George Orwell was a British author who wrote novels, essays, and non-fiction works. He is best known for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and his novella Animal Farm. His works are known for their criticism of totalitarianism and for their advocacy of democratic socialism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by George Orwell on power, socialism, war.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.
Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
George Orwell Quotes About Power
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. — George Orwell
The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes. — George Orwell
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. — George Orwell
The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? — George Orwell
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. — George Orwell
A liberal is a power worshipper without the power. — George Orwell
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. — George Orwell
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. — George Orwell
The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action. — George Orwell
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ' Socialism ' and ' Communism ' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. — George Orwell
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. — George Orwell
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it. — George Orwell
In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country. — George Orwell
Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated. — George Orwell
In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. — George Orwell
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling. — George Orwell
It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs — George Orwell
It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About War
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. — George Orwell
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. — George Orwell
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. — George Orwell
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink — George Orwell
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. — George Orwell
It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours. — George Orwell
The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad. — George Orwell
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. — George Orwell
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Government
Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. — George Orwell
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside — George Orwell
In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone. — George Orwell
They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Writing
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. — George Orwell
Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen. — George Orwell
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane. — George Orwell
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. — George Orwell
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. — George Orwell
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. — George Orwell
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? — George Orwell
Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing. — George Orwell
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Communism
I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence. — George Orwell
The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated. — George Orwell
You were the dead; theirs was the future. — George Orwell
Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered? — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Freedom
Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose — George Orwell
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. — George Orwell
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. — George Orwell
When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys — George Orwell
True freedom is the right to say something that others don't want to hear. — George Orwell
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. — George Orwell
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt. — George Orwell
Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. — George Orwell
From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. — George Orwell
Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi. — George Orwell
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. — George Orwell
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. — George Orwell
Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth. — George Orwell
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics. — George Orwell
The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. — George Orwell
... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully. — George Orwell
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned. — George Orwell
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. — George Orwell
England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Education
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment. — George Orwell
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy. — George Orwell
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life. — 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. — George Orwell
For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Animal Farm
No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? — George Orwell
No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE. — George Orwell
All men are enemies. All animals are comrades — George Orwell
The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Life
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly. — George Orwell
There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later. — George Orwell
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane. — 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. — George Orwell
This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright. — George Orwell
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work. — George Orwell
In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer. — George Orwell
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. — George Orwell
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal. — George Orwell
The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About People
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. — George Orwell
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. — 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. — George Orwell
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. — George Orwell
It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children — George Orwell
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job. — George Orwell
All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them. — George Orwell
People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word. — George Orwell
The English are probably more capable than most peoples of making revolutionary change without bloodshed. In England, if anywhere,it would be possible to abolish poverty without destroying liberty. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Intelligent
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. — George Orwell
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them. — 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
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. — 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. — George Orwell
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? — George Orwell
The more intelligent, the less sane — George Orwell
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent. — George Orwell
One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence. — George Orwell
George Orwell Quotes About Words
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. — George Orwell
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. — George Orwell
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. — George Orwell
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.' — 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
it was only a hopeless fantasy, it passed like an april day, but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred they have stolen my heart away. — George Orwell
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. — George Orwell
Never use a long word where a short one will do. — George Orwell
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out — 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
George Orwell Famous Quotes And Sayings
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. — George Orwell
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me-- — George Orwell
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. — George Orwell
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. — George Orwell
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. — George Orwell
If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. — George Orwell
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. — George Orwell
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree. — 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
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. — 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. — George Orwell
The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be. — George Orwell
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. — George Orwell
A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. — George Orwell
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. — George Orwell
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. — George Orwell
Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear. — George Orwell
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. — 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. — George Orwell
Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. — George Orwell
We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. — George Orwell
And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive. — George Orwell
The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion. — George Orwell
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. — George Orwell
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. — George Orwell
The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham . — George Orwell
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. — George Orwell
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. — George Orwell
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — George Orwell
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. — George Orwell
The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. — George Orwell
It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other. — George Orwell
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up. — George Orwell
The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good. — George Orwell
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already. — George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad. — George Orwell
We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases. — 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
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. — George Orwell
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself. — George Orwell
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist — George Orwell
Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise. — 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. — George Orwell
Reality is inside the skull. — George Orwell
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. — George Orwell
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. — George Orwell
A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature — George Orwell
Life Lessons by George Orwell
George Orwell taught us to be mindful of the power of language and its ability to shape our thoughts and actions. He also emphasized the importance of speaking truth to power and being aware of the political implications of our words and actions. Lastly, he reminded us to strive for clarity and honesty in our communication and to be wary of those who seek to manipulate language for their own ends.
Citation
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