top of page
"For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Resistance quotes

"Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don't want to do so."

"The old resists the new one.'Change hurts' is the reason."

"We can always be sure of one thing-that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments."

"A common and natural result of an undue respect of law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart."

"Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority."

"A flicker of defiance flared very briefly in Rincewind's battered heart."

"And if we burn, you burn with us."

"There's a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future."

"And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed."

"She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear-fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met... She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion-to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt."
Explore more quotes by George Orwell

"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac."

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."

"Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."
bottom of page