George Orwell quotes

Born
25 June 1903 Motihari, Bengal Presidency, British India.

Died
21 January 1950.

Occupation
Novelist, essayist, journalist.

Eric Arthur Blair better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
– George Orwell

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.
– George Orwell

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

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
– George Orwell

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

For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.
– George Orwell

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
– George Orwell

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
– George Orwell

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.
– George Orwell

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

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

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

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.
– George Orwell

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
– George Orwell

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

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

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

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

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.
– George Orwell

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

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

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

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

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

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.
– George Orwell

Good writing is like a windowpane.
– George Orwell

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?
– George Orwell

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

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
– George Orwell

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

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.
– George Orwell

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

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

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.
– George Orwell

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

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

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
– George Orwell

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.
– George Orwell

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

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.
– George Orwell

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
– George Orwell

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
– George Orwell

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

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

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

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.
– George Orwell

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

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.
– George Orwell

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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
– George Orwell

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
– George Orwell

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

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