George Orwell quotes

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

• 12
• imagination

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

• 12
• generations

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

• 12
• freedom

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

• 12
• alike

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

• 11
• goodness

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

• 11
• being

Four legs good, two legs bad.

• 10
• animals

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?

• 10
• against

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

• 10
• civilization

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

• 9
• love

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

• 9
• patriotism

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

• 9
• custard

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

• 9
• corrupt

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

• 9
• education

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.

• 8
• speeches

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

• 8
• news

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

• 8
• politics

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.

• 8
• age

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).

• 8
• atheist

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

• 7
• being

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

• 7
• intelligence

But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.

• 7
• spirituality

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

• 7
• certain

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.

• 5
• act

All animals are equalBut some animals are more equal than others

• 5

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

• 5
• beings

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.

• 5
• power

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

• 5
• war

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

• 5
• against

By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.

• 5
• revolution

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

• 4
• authors

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

• 4
• saint

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.

• 4
• achieve

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

• 4
• act

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

• 4
• liberal

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

• 4
• bring

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

• 4
• authors

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

• 4
• religion

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

• 4
• progress

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

• 3
• comfortable

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.

• 3
• books

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.

• 3
• atrocities

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

• 3
• defeat

History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.

• 3
• history

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

• 3
• nation

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.

• 3
• aims

He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

• 3
• past

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.

• 3
• children

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

• 3
• age

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

• 3
• equality

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

• 3
• inspirational

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

• 3
• food

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.

• 2
• constantly

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

• 2
• intelligence

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

• 2
• future

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.

• 2
• maturity

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

• 2
• advertising

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

• 2
• freedom

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

• 2
• beings

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.

• 2
• tragedy

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

• 1
• come

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

• 1
• minus

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

• 1
• life

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

• 1
• evil

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

• 1
• absurd

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

• 1
• technology

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 spurting out ink.

• 1
• language

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.

• 1
• difference

He was alone with seven thousand books...mostly aged and unsaleable.

• 1
• life

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism -- robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

• 1
• slavery

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

• 1
• society

Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

• 1
• life

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

• 1
• freedom

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

• 1
• future

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

• 1
• truth

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

• writing

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

• language

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

• already

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.

• class

A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you

• authors

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.

• acceptance

The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

• heroesheroism

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.

• modern

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.

• food

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

• beds

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.

• animal

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

• evil

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

• authors

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

• revolution

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.

• politics

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.

• almost

To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.

• trouble

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.

• criticism

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

• writing

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.

• catch

One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.

• kindness

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

• perfection

The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.

• first

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

• tyranny

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.

• youth

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

• military

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

• fat

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

• freedom

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

• came

To see what is in front of ones nose needs a constant struggle.

• wisdom

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?

• advantage

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

• poet

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.

• legacy

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

• power

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

• war

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

• april

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

• education

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.

• sports

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.

• education

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

• writing

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

• defense

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

• violence

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

• worth

Good writing is like a windowpane.

• writing

The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.

• nudity