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Quotes from Keep the Aspidistra Flying — George Orwell

1903–1950

← All quotes by George Orwell

24 quotes

And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

The Americans always go one better on any kind of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering or theosophy.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

No rich man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

When you have no money your life is one long series of snubs.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Why is it that one can't borrow from a rich friend and can from a half-starved relative?

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

After all, it's only what Marx said. Every ideology is a reflection of economic circumstances.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Social failure, artistic failure, sexual failure - they are all the same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Their friendship was at an end, it seemed to him. The evil time when he had lived on Ravelston had spoiled everything. Charity kills friendship.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

In a country like England you can no more be cultured without money than you can join the Cavalry Club.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Money is the one thing you must never mention when you are with people richer than yourself. Or if you do, then it must be money in the abstract, money with a big 'M', not the actual concrete money that's in your pocket and isn't in mine.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

This life we live nowadays! It's not life, it's stagnation, death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses, and the meaningless people inside them! Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

There are two ways to live, he decided. You can be rich, or you can deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. 'Don't talk to me about the lower classes,' she used to say. 'I hate them. They smell.' And Ravelston adored her.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Poverty is spiritual halitosis.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

He would only drift and sink, drift and sink, like the others of his family; but worse than them - down, down into some dreadful sub-world that as yet he could only dimly imagine. It was what he had chosen when he declared war on money. Serve the money-god or go under; there is no other rule.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

That is the devilish thing about poverty, the ever-recurrent thing - loneliness. Day after day with never an intelligent person to talk to; night after night back to your godless room, always alone. Perhaps it sounds rather fun if you are rich and sought-after; but how different it is when you do it from necessity!

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: George Orwell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.