George Orwell quotes
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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.
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.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
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.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
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.
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.
You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
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In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Football, beer, and above all gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.
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Go to table of contentsAbout George Orwell
Where is George Orwell from? George Orwell is British who said awesome wise words. A influential and well recognized author all over the world. The following quotations and images represent the British nature embed in George Orwell's character.
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Top George Orwell quotes about writing
What are the best writing quotes by George Orwell? List with Top 10 George Orwell sayings and quotes about writing.
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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Top George Orwell quotes about intelligent
What are the best intelligent quotes by George Orwell? List with Top 10 George Orwell sayings and quotes about intelligent.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
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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Top George Orwell quotes about language
What are the best language quotes by George Orwell? List with Top 10 George Orwell sayings and quotes about language.
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.
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Top George Orwell quotes about life
What are the best life quotes by George Orwell? List with Top 10 George Orwell sayings and quotes about life.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
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.
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Top George Orwell quotes about people
What are the best people quotes by George Orwell? List with Top 10 George Orwell sayings and quotes about people.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
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.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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More quotes by George Orwell
Want some more good quotations by George Orwell? Explore the rest of 152 sayings by George Orwell.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
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?
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
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.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).
But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.
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.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
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.
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
All animals are equalBut some animals are more equal than others
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from 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.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
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.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
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.
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
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.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
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.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
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.
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.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
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.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
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.
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.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
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.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
He was alone with seven thousand books...mostly aged and unsaleable.
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.
To see what is in front of ones nose needs a constant struggle.
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?
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 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.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
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.
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.
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
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.
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.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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.
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.
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
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
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.
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.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
Kipling sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.
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.
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
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.
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?
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.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
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.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
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When was George Orwell birthday? George Orwell was born on June 25, 1903.
Who is George Orwell? Some facts about George Orwell from biography. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic soci... Read more about George Orwell on Wikipedia or watch videos with quotes from George Orwell on YouTube.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part 1
Introduction
Part 2
Best George Orwell quotes
Top 10 quotes by George Orwell
Top 10 George Orwell quotes about writing
Part 3
George Orwell quotes images
Part 4
Writing
Intelligent
Language
Life
People
All quotes
Part 5
Similar Authors
Part 6
Favorite topics
Part 7
Conclusion