George Orwell Quotes

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

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

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

Big Brother is watching you.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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

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

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Sanity is not statistical.

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

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

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

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

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

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

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

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

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing

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 object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

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.

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.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys

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.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

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

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.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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.

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

An 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

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.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

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.