George Orwell Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

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

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

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me--

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.

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

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

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

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

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

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose

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

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree.

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

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.

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.

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?

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

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.

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.

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

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

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.

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

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

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

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

one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

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.

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.