George Orwell Quotations

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

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.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

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.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

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?

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

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.

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.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

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.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

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.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

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.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

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.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

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.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

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.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

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?

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

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

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

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.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

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.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

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.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

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.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'

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.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittenly conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

...in the negative part of Professor's Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act

(Doublethink) to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed

Speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.