The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’ (1968) vol. 4, p. 515
Good prose is like a window-pane.
‘Collected Essays’ (1968) vol. 1 ‘Why I Write’
I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man,
just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?
‘Coming up For Air’ (1939) pt. 1, ch. 3.
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as
personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never
improve.
‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ (1933) ch. 30
The deep, deep sleep of England.
‘Homage to Catalonia’ (1939) ad fin.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie...A dirty joke is a sort of
mental rebellion.
‘Horizon’ September 1941 ‘The Art of Donald McGill’
Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right
by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need
for any other.
‘Inside the Whale’ (1940) ‘Charles Dickens’
Keep the aspidistra flying.
Title of novel (1936)
England...resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it
but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kowtowed
to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about
the source of the family income (ie the Empire). It is a family in which the young are generally
thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponisble uncles and bed-ridden aunts. Still,
it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an
enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control.
‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) pt. 1 ‘England Your England’
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles
of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) pt. 1 ‘England Your England’.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949) pt. 1, ch. 1
Big brother is watching you.
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949) pt. 1, ch. 1
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949) pt. 1, ch. 1
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1949) pt. 1, ch. 3