George Orwell Quotes

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

Big Brother is watching you.

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

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.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

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

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.

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

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

Four legs good, two legs bad.

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

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

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

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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.

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?

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

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

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

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

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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

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