George Orwell Quotes

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

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

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

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

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

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.

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

Football, beer, and above all gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

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

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.

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

A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.

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

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

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

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

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

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

To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

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

Big Brother is watching you.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

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.

You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm.

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

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

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

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

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

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

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

Four legs good, two legs bad.

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

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

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

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

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?

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie.

.. a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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