Famous George Orwell Quotations

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"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."
by George Orwell
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
by George Orwell
"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
by George Orwell
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
by George Orwell
"Big Brother is watching you."
by George Orwell
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
by George Orwell
"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."
by George Orwell
"There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction."
by George Orwell
"To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself."
by George Orwell
"We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun."
by George Orwell
"We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose."
by George Orwell
"Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."
by George Orwell
"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper."
by George Orwell
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
by George Orwell
"He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past."
by 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."
by George Orwell
"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
by George Orwell
"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."
by George Orwell
"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."
by 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."
by George Orwell
"No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy."
by George Orwell
"One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up."
by George Orwell
"Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards."
by George Orwell
"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."
by 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."
by George Orwell
"The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun."
by George Orwell
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
by George Orwell
"I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."
by George Orwell
"For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him."
by George Orwell
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
by 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."
by George Orwell
"Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility."
by George Orwell
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
by George Orwell
"Happiness can exist only in acceptance."
by George Orwell
"...Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."
by George Orwell
"A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase."
by George Orwell
"A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."
by George Orwell
"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."
by George Orwell
"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others"
by 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."
by George Orwell
"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
by George Orwell
"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."
by George Orwell
"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing."
by George Orwell
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."
by George Orwell
"At fifty everyone has the face he deserves."
by George Orwell
"At age 50, every man has the face he deserves."
by George Orwell
"At 50, everyone has the face he deserves"
by George Orwell
"As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents."
by George Orwell
"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."
by George Orwell
"Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad."
by George Orwell
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
by George Orwell
"Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing."
by George Orwell
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
by George Orwell
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act"
by 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."
by George Orwell
"Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
by 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."
by George Orwell
"For a creative writer possession of the 'truth'' is less important than emotional sincerity"
by George Orwell
"For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity."
by George Orwell
"For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him."
by George Orwell
"Four legs good, two legs bad."
by George Orwell
"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
by George Orwell
"Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four. If granted, all else follows."
by George Orwell
"From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned."
by George Orwell
"Good writing is like a windowpane."
by George Orwell
"He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him."
by George Orwell
"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future"
by George Orwell
"He who controls the past controls the future."
by George Orwell
"I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment."
by George Orwell
"I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man."
by George Orwell
"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."
by George Orwell
"If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?"
by George Orwell
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
by George Orwell
"If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever."
by George Orwell
"In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane."
by George Orwell
"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."
by 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."
by George Orwell
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."
by George Orwell
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
by George Orwell
"It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found to be generally true that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon --so long as there is no answer to it-- gives claws to the weak."
by George Orwell
"It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane."
by George Orwell
"It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning."
by George Orwell
"It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen."
by George Orwell
"Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant."
by George Orwell
"Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers."
by 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."
by 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."
by George Orwell
"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."
by George Orwell
"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."
by George Orwell
"Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be."
by George Orwell
"Myths which are believed in tend to become true."
by George Orwell
"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."
by George Orwell
"No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is a thing that human beings must avoid."
by George Orwell
"No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer."
by George Orwell
"Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."
by George Orwell
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
by George Orwell
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time."
by George Orwell
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not to good and not quite all the time."
by George Orwell
"One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return."
by George Orwell
"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."
by George Orwell


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