George Orwell Quotes

The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one — at least, no male person — ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker’s Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like —— and ——.

~ George Orwell

Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something you had a right to.

~ George Orwell

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays—when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?

~ George Orwell

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

~ George Orwell

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.

~ George Orwell

Big Brother is watching you.

~ 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 if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

~ George Orwell

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

~ George Orwell

We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.

~ 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

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

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

~ George Orwell

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

~ George Orwell

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

~ George Orwell

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

~ George Orwell

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

~ 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.

~ George Orwell

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

~ George Orwell

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

~ George Orwell

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

~ 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

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

~ George Orwell

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

~ George Orwell

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

~ 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.

~ George Orwell

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

~ George Orwell

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

~ George Orwell

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

~ 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

Good writing is like a windowpane.

~ George Orwell

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

~ 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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

~ George Orwell

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

~ George Orwell

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

~ 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.

~ George Orwell

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

~ George Orwell

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

~ George Orwell

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

~ 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