George Orwell Quotes

The belly comes before the soul.

It has been well said that a hungry man is more interested in four sandwiches than four freedoms.

Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.

If you were to offer a thirsty man all wisdom, you would not please him more than if you gave him a drink.

When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

The Italians of today think of the belly, not of the soul.

If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches they will take sandwiches.

We're working-class people, which means we don't get rich or have maids. Be content with what you are and what you have.

Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?

The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!

Love is a luxury. It's something that people are allowed to indulge in when they're not simply trying to survive and keep other people alive.

There are three gems upon this earth; food, water, and pleasing words - fools (mudhas) consider pieces of rocks as gems.

First feed the face, then talk right and wrong.

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things : That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

I hated being stuck at home doing the student thing. I always wanted to work. And there's nothing wrong with it. So you can take what you can get. And, you know, this, 'Well, that's beneath me. I have a degree.' Put it aside for a while because reality is what it is. There are a lot of people having to do a lot of things that they think are beneath them right now because McDonald's is not open to make sure you don't starve. That's your job. Your responsibility to make sure you don't starve and your kids don't starve and all the rest of it.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.

The wage-earning class the world over are the victims of society.

'Mediocre' tends to mean 'undistinguished', while snobs enjoy their distinguishing hallmarks of style - how they wear clothes, use words, where they go and gather and gossip. ...Whatever the circumstances the genius has put you into, the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements.

It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.