Homage to Catalonia Quotes
Homage to CataloniaHomage to Catalonia by George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia Quotes (showing 1-30 of 109)
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of thier own at horrible speed. I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate thier pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war indeed! In war all solderies are lousy, at the least when it is warm enough. The men that fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of my mouth. ‘The artery’s gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting—I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale comer of the trenches, thanks to a moment’s carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me—wondered what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting. It may be, though, that if you were really dying your thoughts would be quite different.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“For some reason, all the best matadors were Fascists.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism,’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers’ control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why ‘liberal’ capitalist opinion took the same line.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“There was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
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“Perhaps when the next Great War comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
tags: insightful 11 likes Like
“You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire – not so much afraid of being hit as afraid because you don’t know where you will be hit. You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“For the first time in my life I took to writing things on walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had ‘ Visca P.O.U.M.!’ scrawled on them as large as I could write it. All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that they cannot arrest you unless you have committed a crime. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“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.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous year and announcing that ‘six handsome bulls’ would be killed in the arena on such and such a date. How forlorn its faded colours looked. Where were the handsome bulls and the handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays – for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
tags: morality, war 9 likes Like
“And the whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“The men who were well enough to stand had moved across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war *is* glorious after all.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart. Practically—i.e. in the form of society aimed at—the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable. The Communist’s emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist’s on liberty and equality.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“I was said of these bombs (referring to FAI bombs) that they were ‘impartial’; they killed then man they were thrown at and the man who threw them.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness – on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
tags: doldrums-of-war, spanish-civil-war, trench-warfare, war 7 likes Like
“The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners are alike appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality. The one word that no foreigner can avoid learning is mañana.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
tags: spaniard, spanish, war 7 likes Like
“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“…It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched. Libel settles nothing…”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia