Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
– George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to
hear.
– George Orwell
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
– George Orwell
Big Brother is watching you.
– 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
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
– George Orwell
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or
aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.
– George Orwell
Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy
but towards the reimposition of slavery.
– George Orwell
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.
– George Orwell
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
– George Orwell
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
– George Orwell
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
– George Orwell
War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the
depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too
comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
– George Orwell
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
– George Orwell
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
– George Orwell
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
– George Orwell
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on
those who would do us harm.
– George Orwell
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
– George Orwell
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.
– George Orwell
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more
than others.
– George Orwell
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know
that fire is hot.
– George Orwell
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
– George Orwell
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most
grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
– George Orwell
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both
honest and intelligent.
– George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad.
– George Orwell
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter.
– George Orwell
High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat
always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it
comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
– George Orwell
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.
– George Orwell
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
– George Orwell
I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.
– George Orwell
You can have affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have affection for a man
whose breath stinks.
– George Orwell
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
– George Orwell
It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on
the contrary by using one’s intelligence.
– George Orwell
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
– George Orwell
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought
human equality a millimeter nearer.
– 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
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job.
– George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
– George Orwell
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
– George Orwell
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going
to profit from it.
– George Orwell
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
– George Orwell
The best books are those that tell you what you know already.
– George Orwell
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some
improvement by starting at the verbal end.
– George Orwell
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.
– George Orwell
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
– George Orwell
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding
of their history.
– George Orwell
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his
personality, and even then not all the time.
– George Orwell
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or
eight onwards.
– George Orwell
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give
an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
– George Orwell
And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.
– George Orwell
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else
follows.
– George Orwell
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your
arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
– George Orwell
Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive,
pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is
pro-Nazi.
– George Orwell
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.
– George Orwell
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to
describing England in a phrase.
– George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
– George Orwell
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
– George Orwell
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always
one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
– George Orwell
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
– George Orwell
Liberal: A power worshipper without power.
– George Orwell
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.
– George Orwell
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to
assume that the child feels any love in return.
– George Orwell
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own
nationality.
– George Orwell
Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
– George Orwell
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil
which is independent of heaven and hell.
– George Orwell
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
– George Orwell
Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore
thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply
reveals his own emptiness.
– George Orwell
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
– George Orwell
Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
– George Orwell
I consider that willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty.
– George Orwell
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.
– George Orwell
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
– George Orwell
It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of
the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free
press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but
to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your
adversary.
– George Orwell
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of
intelligent men.
– George Orwell
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
– George Orwell
Living a lie the whole time – the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of
to rob them… it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can’t imagine.
– 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
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
– George Orwell
Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are
cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of
the citizen.
– George Orwell
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
– George Orwell
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
– George Orwell
If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you; won’t, that is, care for
you or love you the last little bit that matters.
– George Orwell
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of
human labor.
– George Orwell
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people
who are not fighting.
– George Orwell
For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
– George Orwell
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity
of civilization.
– George Orwell
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface
one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
– George Orwell
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
– George Orwell
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two
evils.
– George Orwell
A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position,
has to be thought of as infallible.
– George Orwell
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
– George Orwell