George Orwell on War
Browse 8 quotations attributed to George Orwell, catalogued under war, with dates where available.
This page displays 8 quotations attributed to George Orwell and filed under "war" in QuoteLineage. The selection is ordered by stored importance and quality scores, not citation counts. A topic label describes how an entry is catalogued; it does not establish the theme's importance in the author's work.
Attributed to George Orwell, entry #139426: "All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
Attributed to George Orwell, entry #99598: "One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army."
8 Quotes by George Orwell on War
"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
"One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army."
"There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all."
"It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours."
"People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty to some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful."
"Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak."
"We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases."
"Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’."