George Orwell Quotes

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.

The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.

There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

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

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.

I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

Writing a novel is agony.

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

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

It's a wonderful feeling to have a niece like youBecause you are always so dearYou are so dear no matter the yearBut all throughout each day of the yearThere could hardly be a town in the South of England where youcould throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as "robust.

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.

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

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

I have no wish to take life, not even human life

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.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature, Frederick and Pilkington said.

The belly comes before the soul.

For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

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

Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact.

And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.

When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.He becomes a sort of hollow,posing dummy,the conventional figure of a sahib.For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives",and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him.He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.

The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.

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

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

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.

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

All art is propaganda.

True freedom is the right to say something that others don't want to hear.

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.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

She was very young...she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

You were the dead; theirs was the future.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.

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.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

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