Best quotes by the British Author George Orwell
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.
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.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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.
Big Brother is watching you.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
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.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
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War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
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.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
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.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
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.
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
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George Orwell writing quotes
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For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
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.
I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
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.
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
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.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
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 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.
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?
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George Orwell language quotes
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Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
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.
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.
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.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
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George Orwell intelligent quotes
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Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
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?
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
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For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
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.
I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
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
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.
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The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
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.
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?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
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).
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
All animals are equalBut some animals are more equal than others
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 quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
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.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
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.
I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
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.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
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.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
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.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
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.
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
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.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
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.
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
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.
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.
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.
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
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.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
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.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
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.
He was alone with seven thousand books...mostly aged and unsaleable.
Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life...
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.
Kipling sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.
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.
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.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
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.
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.
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.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
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.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
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?
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
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.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
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.
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.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
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.
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