75 George Orwell Quotes for All Time
Eric Arthur Blair (born June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, India – died January 21, 1950, in London, England), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic whose works dealt with some of the major political movements of his time.
Orwell is best remembered today for his two novels, the allegorical Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In addition to them, his most notable works include Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938).
Considered one of the most famous English essayists of the 20th century, Orwell’s influence on contemporary culture, popular and political, continues to grow decades after his death. Many of his neologisms, including the term Orwellian, are now part of the English language.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.Politics and the English Language (December 11, 1945)
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. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 266
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.The Sporting Spirit (December 14, 1945)
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.Politics and the English Language (December 11, 1945)
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 251
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.Reflections on Gandhi (January 1949)
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 290
The prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash – though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment – but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.Confessions of a Book Reviewer (May 3, 1946)
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1954), Page 66
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 271
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.The Art of Donald McGill (September 1941)
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 219
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)
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.Such, Such Were the Joys (1947)
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTHNineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 5
There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.Coming Up for Air (1939), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1939), Page 82
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 215
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.In Front of Your Nose (March 22, 1946)
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.Burmese Days (1934), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1962), Page 68
If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 283
The mind will play curious tricks when it is in a tight corner.A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1969), Page 296
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 252
Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted.Burmese Days (1934), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1962), Page 69
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.Reflections on Gandhi (January 1949)
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 270
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.Reflections on Gandhi (January 1949)
We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 256
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.Arthur Koestler (September 11, 1944)
Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.Notes on Nationalism (October 1945)
In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 102
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.Boys' Weeklies (March 11, 1940)
The choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 265
The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.The Prevention of Literature (January 1946)
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.In 1945, George Orwell wrote an introduction to 'Animal Farm.'
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.The statement, in New Stateman and Nation (August 28, 1937)
If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 167
A joke is at most a temporary rebellion against virtue, and its aim is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.Funny, but not Vulgar (December 1, 1944)
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), (Victor Gollancz, ed. 1937), Page 197
Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.Burmese Days (1934), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1962), Page 57
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 130
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 281
One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.Homage to Catalonia (1938), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1938), Page 67
Every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), (Victor Gollancz, ed. 1937), Page 190
The best books are those that tell you what you know already.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 200
In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), (Victor Gollancz, ed. 1937), Page 176
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 3
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), (Victor Gollancz, ed. 1937), Page 98
You can get anything in this world if you genuinely don’t want it.Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1954), Page 71
The logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), (Victor Gollancz, ed. 1937), Page 233
It is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.Burmese Days (1934), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1962), Page 70
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party (June 24, 1939)
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.Boys' Weeklies (March 11, 1940)
The price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), (Victor Gollancz, ed. 1937), Page 72
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 80
You can go on blackening people’s reputations for years, and everyone will believe you, more or less, even when it’s perfectly obvious that you’re lying.A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1969), Page 291
If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking.Coming Up for Air (1939), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1939), Page 126
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 208
Life’s here to be lived, and if we’re going to be in the soup next week – well, next week is a long way off.Coming Up for Air (1939), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1939), Page 140
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.Politics and the English Language (December 11, 1945)
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.Reflections on Gandhi (January 1949)
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 191
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946)
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.These were apparently the last words the Nineteen Eighty-Four author penned in his personal diary. Manuscript Notebook (April 17, 1949)
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 255
Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had neighbours who knew you.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), (Victor Gollancz, ed. 1937), Page 79
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?Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 266
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.Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (March 7, 1947)
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.Animal Farm (1945), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1945), Page 105
One’s got to change the system, or one changes nothing.Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1954), Page 258
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job.The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), (Victor Gollancz, ed. 1937), Page 177
No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 266
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.Animal Farm (1945), (Secker & Warburg, ed. 1945), Page 10
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), (Harcourt, Brace & World, ed. 1949), Page 81
Disputed
People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. (More info)
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. (More info)