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Quotes by George Orwell


Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
– George Orwell

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
– George Orwell
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
– George Orwell
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
– George Orwell
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
– George Orwell
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
– George Orwell
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
– George Orwell
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
– George Orwell
Big Brother is watching you.
– George Orwell
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
– George Orwell
But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.
– George Orwell
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
– George Orwell
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
– George Orwell
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
– George Orwell
For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
– George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad.
– George Orwell
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
– George Orwell
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
– George Orwell
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
– George Orwell
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
– George Orwell
If a man meets with injustice, it is not required that he shall not be roused to meet it; but if he is angry after he has had time to think upon it, that is sinful. The flame is not wring, but the coals are.
– George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
– George Orwell
If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
– George Orwell
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
– George Orwell
In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.
– George Orwell
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
– George Orwell
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
– George Orwell
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
– George Orwell
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
– George Orwell
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
– George Orwell
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
– George Orwell
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
– George Orwell
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
– George Orwell
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
– George Orwell
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
– George Orwell
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
– George Orwell
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
– George Orwell
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
– George Orwell
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
– George Orwell
One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.
– George Orwell
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
– George Orwell
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
– George Orwell
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
– George Orwell
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.
– George Orwell
Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.
– George Orwell
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
– George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
– George Orwell
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
– George Orwell
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
– George Orwell
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
– George Orwell
The crowds in the big towns, with their mild, knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes.
– George Orwell
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
– George Orwell
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
– George Orwell
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
– George Orwell
The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
– George Orwell
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
– George Orwell
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
– George Orwell
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
– George Orwell
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
– George Orwell
To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.
– George Orwell
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
– George Orwell
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
– George Orwell
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
– George Orwell
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
– George Orwell
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
– George Orwell
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
– George Orwell
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
– George Orwell
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
– George Orwell
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
– George Orwell
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
– George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
– George Orwell
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
– George Orwell
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
– George Orwell
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.
– George Orwell
I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. […] One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.
– George Orwell
Mr Wells […]belongs to the non military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swash-buckling side of life, symbolized in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses.
– George Orwell
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
– George Orwell
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
– George Orwell
It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.
– George Orwell
War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
– George Orwell
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
– George Orwell
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
– George Orwell
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
– George Orwell
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
– George Orwell
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
– George Orwell
Oceania was at war with Eurasia therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
– George Orwell
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
– George Orwell
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
– George Orwell
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
– George Orwell
A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
– George Orwell