George Orwell Quotes

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organizationally these ‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious

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.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

They cannot divide us by saying that you're middle class or you're lower class.

In 1750, 75 percent of people on the planet worked to support the top 25 percent.

Class structures are a luxury that we cannot afford.

His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants hall.

There are only two classes - first class and no class.

It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate, / God made them high or lowly. / And ordered their estate.

The division of society into the producing and non-producing classes ... capital and labor.... Antagonism and opposition of interest is introduced in the community; capital and labor stand opposed.

Is the great working class oppressed? Yes, undoubtedly it is. God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little.

It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few ...

What the poor did to the poor was the business of the poor, not the business of the proper people who ran the city.

There are no great lords who possess everything and a herd of people who have nothing

Between the working class and the capitalist class, there is an irrepressible conflict, a class struggle for life. No glib-tongued politician can vault over it, no capitalist professor or official statistician can argue it away; no capitalist parson can veil it; no labor faker can straddle it; no “reform” architect can bridge it over. It crops up in all manner of ways

Just experience tells in every soil That those who think must govern those that toil

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

Surely there is something unlovely, to modern as against medieval minds, about marked inequality of either kind income or power.

Farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

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

The whole policy of the Cotton dynasty tends necessarily to making broader the chasm between these orders is most apparent. It makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer; for, as, according to the creed of the dynasty, capital should own labor, and the labor thus owned can alone successfully produce cotton.

Our nation’s political spectrum is not left to right, but top to bottom. People can locate themselves on this rich-to-poor pole for this is not a theoretical positioning: It’s based on our actual experience with money and power.

Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.