George Orwell Quotes

If work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.

The worker is always in the sun while the landowner is always in the shade.

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

The ignorance of the working class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions fostered by ... universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege.

It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another.... Remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created.

The struggle for power in our day lies not between Crown and people, or between a caste of nobles and a bourgeoisie, but between the classes who have property and the classes who have none.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums …

Workers cannot buy with their salaries what they have produced and at the same time copiously nourish the swarm of idlers who live upon their work.

The higher classes constitute the mind of the single large whole of humanity; the lower classes constitute its limbs;

The histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher class.

With industrialization the gulf between the employed and the employer is growing wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper—as liveried carriages appear, so do barefoot children.

The possession of wealth does not confer upon the wealthy the right to take advantage of the less fortunate.

Davos is where billionaires tell millionairs what middle class people think.

So long as there are nobles and commoners, the wealthy and the poor, those with power will be heard, and those without ignored. That's the world.

Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne.

The most powerful forces in economics are not numbers or facts. They are prejudices and preferences. No amount of evidence will ever change the degree to which many of the rich and powerful prefer themselves to be richer and more powerful and others poorer and weaker.

The wealthy have never liked to pay for the labor that enriches them. Ever since slavery was eliminated, they have been trying to keep it as close to slavery as they can without violating the slave laws.

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Class is real. It can't be faked.