quotes by George Orwell

"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
— George Orwell

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell (1984)

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

"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
— George Orwell

"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."
— George Orwell (Animal Farm)

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection."
— George Orwell

"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."
— George Orwell

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

"Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
— George Orwell

"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."
— George Orwell (Animal Farm)

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Beautiful thing, the destruction of words. "
— George Orwell

"Big Brother is Watching You."
— George Orwell (1984)

"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?

Politics and the English Language, 1946"
— George Orwell

"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."
— George Orwell (1984)

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

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
— George Orwell (1984)

"We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."
— George Orwell (1984)

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

"Sanity is not statistical."
— George Orwell

"To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle."
— George Orwell

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
— George Orwell (1984)

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

"At 50, everyone has the face he deserves."
— George Orwell

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

"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."
— George Orwell

"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."
— George Orwell

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

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. 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. Now you begin to understand me."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
— George Orwell (1984)

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
— George Orwell (1984)

"It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety."
— George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London)

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Four legs good, two legs bad."
— George Orwell (Animal Farm)

"You are a slow learner, Winston."
"How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."
— George Orwell (1984)

"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."
— George Orwell

"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right."
— George Orwell

"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity."
— George Orwell

"[Winston writes in his forbidden diary]
Winston Smith: April the 4th, 1984. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man... greetings."
— George Orwell

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

"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?"
— George Orwell (Animal Farm: A Fairy Story)

""The very word 'war', therefore, has become
misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that
by becoming continuous, war has ceased to exist...
War is Peace."
— George Orwell

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
— George Orwell

"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."
— George Orwell

"So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult."
— George Orwell (1984)

"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."
— George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier)