"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting"
About this Quote
Orwell lands the blow with a simple reversal: the loudest voices for war belong to the safest bodies. The line is built like an accusation and a diagnosis at once. By stacking "screaming and lies and hatred" into a breathless pile, he mimics the very propaganda he’s condemning - not to amplify it, but to show how easily it becomes noise, how quickly it trades truth for mood. Then he drops the kicker: "invariably". Not often. Not usually. Always. It’s the kind of absolutism Orwell uses as moral pressure, forcing readers to test their own complicity.
The intent isn’t pacifist softness; it’s anti-romantic clarity. Orwell is suspicious of war not because conflict is never necessary, but because it’s so easy to sell when the seller won’t pay the price. The subtext is classed and bureaucratic: the architects of war sit in offices, write speeches, print posters, and outsource consequences to conscripts, workers, and the poor. War becomes a story managed by professionals of narrative rather than professionals of risk.
Context matters. Orwell wrote in the long shadow of World War I’s propaganda machine and with the lived knowledge of Spain’s civil war, where competing factions weaponized language as aggressively as bullets. He understood that modern war needs a home front kept emotionally inflamed. This sentence isn’t just about hypocrisy; it’s about insulation. When the people who talk the most are the people least exposed, the rhetoric tends to drift toward purity, vengeance, and fantasy - exactly the ingredients that keep wars going.
The intent isn’t pacifist softness; it’s anti-romantic clarity. Orwell is suspicious of war not because conflict is never necessary, but because it’s so easy to sell when the seller won’t pay the price. The subtext is classed and bureaucratic: the architects of war sit in offices, write speeches, print posters, and outsource consequences to conscripts, workers, and the poor. War becomes a story managed by professionals of narrative rather than professionals of risk.
Context matters. Orwell wrote in the long shadow of World War I’s propaganda machine and with the lived knowledge of Spain’s civil war, where competing factions weaponized language as aggressively as bullets. He understood that modern war needs a home front kept emotionally inflamed. This sentence isn’t just about hypocrisy; it’s about insulation. When the people who talk the most are the people least exposed, the rhetoric tends to drift toward purity, vengeance, and fantasy - exactly the ingredients that keep wars going.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Homage to Catalonia — George Orwell, 1938. Line appears in Orwell's first-hand account of the Spanish Civil War and is widely cited from this book. |
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