George Orwell Quotes

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

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

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one si...

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets,...

You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly ...

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equali...

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thi...

We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the ...

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever wri...

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defen...

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

Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope

Before the war and especially before the Boer War it was summer all the year round.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because ...

Writing a novel is agony.

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought sinc...

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way th...

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an ...

…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings.

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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

When I was young and had no senseIn far-off MandalayI lost my heart to a Burmese girlAs lovely as th...

Big Brother is watching you.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, ...

To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope.

The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you ...

All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak...

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since i...

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writ...

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

We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who...

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One w...

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a re...

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

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

It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing t...

No doubt alcohol tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid but sainthood is also a...

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

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

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

All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a diffe...

International sport is war without shooting.

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to aba...

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their ...

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

There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have...

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

There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is becau...

Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall ...

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

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who o...

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to hims...

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

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no suc...

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within t...

[Tolstoy] does not necessarily get rid of [his angry] temperament by undergoing religious conversion...

The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can ma...

Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been che...

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

Liberal - a power worshipper without power.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.

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

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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

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

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort o...

When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and...

No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.

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

Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within...

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?.... In fact there wi...

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

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred...

She's beautiful,' he murmured.'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.'That is her style...

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story...

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the...

It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, becau...

What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, ...

And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’ ‘To make them confess.’ ‘No, that is not...

I have not betrayed Julia.

A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is suppos...

Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyr...

If all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could ma...

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termine...

had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientis...

To die hating them, that was freedom

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the ski...

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where t...

When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselv...

If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.

The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out: 'Swine! Swine! Swine!', and suddenly she p...

It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landsc...