George Orwell Quotes

“I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London-the fact that it costs money even to sit down.”

“One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.”

“Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.”

“It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”

“The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.”

“A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.”

“A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today”

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.”

“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.”

“The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.”

“However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.”

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

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

“If human equality is to be forever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”

“It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.”

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.”

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.”

“Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education and fine arts.The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war.The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order.And the Ministry of Plenty, which is responsible for economic affairs.their names, in Newspeak:Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty”

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

“He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable”

“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.”

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

“It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?”