George Orwell Men Quotations

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittenly conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.

It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.

The more men you've had, the more I love you.

They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself

If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.

If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.

When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man

[T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality.:; Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?

...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

After 40, a man is responsible for his face.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!

The typical socialist... a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?

No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

No man should be allowed to be the President who does not understand hogs, or hasn't been around a manure pile.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as "robust.

One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask whose side I'm on.

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.

All men are enemies. All animals are comrades

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to he a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.He becomes a sort of hollow,posing dummy,the conventional figure of a sahib.For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives",and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him.He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.