Top 774 Quotes & Sayings by George Orwell
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British novelist George Orwell.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
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.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
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.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
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.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
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.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
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.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
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.
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.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
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?
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.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
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.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
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.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
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