George Orwell Quotes

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

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

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

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

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

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

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

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

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

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

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

“Sanity is not statistical.”

“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.”

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”

“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.”

“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink”

“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.”

“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. 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.”

“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”

“The end was contained in the beginning.”

“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”

“He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable”

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

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

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

“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. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

“Four legs good, two legs bad.”

“The only good human being is a dead one.”

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

“Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”

“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”

“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”

“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here” - he tapped his forehead - “and you’re all right.”

“The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes”

Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?

I have no wish to take life, not even human life.

Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.

Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man.

The Seven Commandments: Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. No animal shall wear clothes. No animal shall sleep in a bed. No animal shall drink alcohol. No animal shall kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.

The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.

Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers.

Windmill or no windmill, life would go on as it had always gone on - that is, badly.

His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” —which he had adopted as his personal motto.

He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.

They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

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

Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure!

“Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.”

“It is usually known that newspapers do not say the truth, but it is also known that they cannot tell whoppers.”

“In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It didn’t tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday. ....In a sense his thoughts are circumscribed, but he passes his whole life within the same framework of thought. His emotions aren’t tampered with. Now, with totalitarianism exactly the opposite is true. The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it doesn’t fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but it can’t avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declares itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.”

“If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face,”

“The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that “I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.” It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.”

“The obvious connection between personal unhappiness and the tendency to easily believe the incredible is the most interesting conclusion of this study.”

“Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”

“The inflated [speaking] style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

“One ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you’re freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark it’s stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties from Conservatives to Anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind wind.”

“Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”

“Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.”

“An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is “just the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.”

“It appears, therefore, that though Tolstoy can explain away nearly everything about Shakespeare, there is one thing that he cannot explain away, and that is his popularity. He himself is aware of this, and greatly puzzled by it. I said earlier that the answer to Tolstoy really lies in something he himself is obliged to say. He asks himself how it is that this bad, stupid and im-moral writer Shakespeare is everywhere admired, and finally he can only explain it as a sort of world-wide conspiracy to pervert the truth.”

“Within certain limits, bad thought and bad morals can be good literature. If so great a man as Tolstoy could not demonstrate the contrary, I doubt whether anyone else can either.”