George Orwell Quotes (283 Quotes)

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

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

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

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

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

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

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

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

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

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

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

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

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

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

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

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 main motive for ''nonattachment'' is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

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

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.

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

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

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening

Whoever controls the past, controls the future.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad

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

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

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.

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.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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

The ''Communism'' of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

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

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

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

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

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.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

It is hard to imagine how the U.N., perhaps the world's most important international organization and one which is widely counted on to preserve the truth, could allow itself to blatantly deviate from history and misinform the world about something so fundamental to its history.

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

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

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

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

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.

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

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

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.