George Orwell quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by George Orwell

George Orwell Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from George Orwell on Wise Famous Quotes.

For, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

For some reason, all the best matadors were Fascists.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

[ ... ] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.

Why was it that they could never shout like that about something that mattered?

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

Truth is a matter of Perspective
There will be my truth and your truth and as Universal truth doesn't exist.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

their own children.

If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

He was alone with seven thousand books ... mostly aged and unsaleable.

There is no comfort. Our lives dismay us.
We have dreams of leaving and it is the same for everyone I know.

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

Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.

Though it is unreal it is not meaningless

In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.

Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.

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

As time went on, the Communists and the POUM wrote more bitterly about one another than about the Fascists.

His bowels seemed to turn to water.

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

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.

Libel settles nothing.

In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in us.' - Julia

Prestige, the breath of life, is itself nebulous.

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

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.

To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.

These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.

to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.

There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it.

The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our command is "Thou art".

The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now

Though waiters always die poor, they have long runs of luck occasionally.

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society.

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.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Who cares?' she said impatiently, 'it's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.

World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.

Weakness is strength.

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain

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

One way of feeling infallible is not to keep a diary

The writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

The modern emphasis on what is called 'clean fun' is really the symptom of a general unwillingness to touch upon any serious or controversial subject.

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.

Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

If there is hope, it lies in the proles.

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.

Their job seemed to me so hopeless, so appalling that I wondered how anyone could put up with such a thing when prison was a possible alternative.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side?

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

I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial

Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.

But a child's belief in its own shortcomings is not much influenced by facts.

Will Big Brother ever die?" "Of course not. How could he die? Next question.

It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.

People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.

Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are prepared to live with the consequences.

There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word
Man

Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.

One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then? But

And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

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

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

Since that time, war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.

And remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray.

All the habits of Man are evil.

He who controls the past, commands the future.

Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.

There is nothing more dreadful in the world than to live in somebody else's house, eating his bread and doing nothing in return for it.

if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make

Even if you are a minority of one it does not make you wrong

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.

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .

We have sunk so low it has become the obligation of every decent, thinking individual to re-state the obvious!

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something you had a right to.