George Orwell Quotes

Of course 'we humans' have a funny relationship with the beings with whom we share our planet. We eat them, we care for them, we admire them, we use them.

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

The Americans will have no interest contrary to the grandeur and glory of England, when they are not oppressed by the weight of it …

It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that animals should prey upon each other.

Slavery made the Negro as dependent upon the intelligence and foresight of his master as a soldier upon the will of his commander

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

… one accumulates or one gets accumulated.

How many, even of the better sort, would choose to be slaves to those above them, provided they might exercise an arbitrary and tyrannical rule over all below them?

The commerce of the world is conducted by the strong, and usually it operates against the weak.

Disrespect is the weapon of the weak

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.

Power always has a direction. It is always downward, towards the weak but power is often confused with what is right

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power.

So long as some are strong and some are weak, the weak will be driven to the wall.

The only time the white man is brotherly toward you is when he can use you, when he can exploit you, when he will oppress you, when you will submit to him.

Here's a history lesson: when men took power of their lands, all of a sudden, women became a prize. In order for us to be protected, we had to make sure that we had our partner on our side. We were put in a position where our vulnerability was a life and death scenario. And we were taken advantage of, and we were put in a certain place that we had never been put in before.

The worries that are the burden of which the privileged person makes an excuse in dealing with the oppressed person are in fact the worries about preserving his privileged condition.

The strength of weak people constantly appalls me. Have you ever seen a vine kill an oak tree? Deadly.

What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.

For we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice enters only where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must.