George Orwell Quotes (283 Quotes)

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

This is a kind of Orwellian scenario of attempting to deprive a people of a sense of past and a sense of community on which it depends and to rewrite history,

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

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

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

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

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittenly conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

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.

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.

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

He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is not done to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature

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

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

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

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words

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

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.

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

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

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

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

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

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

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