Top 774 Quotes & Sayings by George Orwell - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

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.

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

Four legs good, two legs bad.

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

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

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.

Big Brother is watching you.

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

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.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

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

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

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.

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.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

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

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

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

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

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

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

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

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.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

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

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language