Zdroj: Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Kontext: I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
George Orwell: Citáty anglicky (strana 13)
George Orwell byl anglický spisovatel a novinář. Citáty anglicky.“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.”
Varianta: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
Zdroj: 1984
“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man”
Zdroj: Animal Farm
"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Zdroj: Why I Write
Kontext: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
“He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.”
Zdroj: Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”
Charles Dickens (1939)
Zdroj: Homage to Catalonia
“It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.”
Zdroj: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 9; a remark by Boris
Zdroj: Down and Out in Paris and London
“When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.”
Zdroj: Shooting an Elephant
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)
Kontext: A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is "weak," "sinful" and anxious for a "good time." Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.