The Best George Orwell quotes

You can get anything in this world if you genuinely don’t want it. — George Orwell

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. — George Orwell

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. — George Orwell

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does. — George Orwell

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

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. — George Orwell

He [Gandhi] was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries. — George Orwell

Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. — George Orwell

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. — George Orwell

True freedom is the right to say something that others don’t want to hear. — George Orwell

To die hating them, that was freedom. — George Orwell

Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. — George Orwell

Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four. if granted, all else follows. — George Orwell

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

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. — George Orwell

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. — George Orwell

Rich people are poor people with money. — George Orwell

I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is. — George Orwell

All human relationships must be purchased with money. — George Orwell

Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you? — George Orwell

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. — George Orwell

The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books. — George Orwell

The only good human being is a dead one. — George Orwell

No sentimentality, comrade…The only good human being is a dead one. — George Orwell

Nothing exists except through human consciousness. — George Orwell

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one. — George Orwell

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

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

The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. — George Orwell

It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other. — George Orwell

Every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. — George Orwell

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face––forever. — George Orwell

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. — George Orwell

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into. — George Orwell

The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity. — George Orwell

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. — George Orwell

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. — George Orwell

If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them. — George Orwell

The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever. — George Orwell

Between pigs and human beings there was not and there need not be any clash of interest whatsoever. — George Orwell

There’s time for everything except the things worth doing. — George Orwell

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

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. — George Orwell

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. — 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

It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. — George Orwell

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

They say that time heals all things, They say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years They twist my heart strings yet! — George Orwell

Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey. — George Orwell

By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. — George Orwell

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people–the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. — George Orwell

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. — George Orwell

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

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. — George Orwell

Liberal: a power worshipper without power. — George Orwell

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self–deception. — George Orwell

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. — George Orwell

Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. — George Orwell

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? — George Orwell

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

It [England] is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. — George Orwell

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes. — George Orwell

The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. — 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. — George Orwell

And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered? — George Orwell

There exists a huge dump of worn–out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. — George Orwell

Power–worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. — George Orwell

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

But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit. — George Orwell

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable–what then? — George Orwell

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. — George Orwell

A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. — George Orwell

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written. — George Orwell

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. — George Orwell

If one harbors anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable. — George Orwell

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. — George Orwell

Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. — George Orwell

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. — George Orwell

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ From ‘Politics and the English Language,’ not 1984. — George Orwell

But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong. — George Orwell

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. — George Orwell

The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. — George Orwell

The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. — George Orwell

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

Such were her thoughts, though she lacked the words to express them. — George Orwell

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought…should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. — George Orwell

What can you do, thought Winston, 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

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on––that is, badly. — George Orwell

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. — George Orwell

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. — George Orwell

It is one of the tragedies of the half–educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life. — George Orwell

Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. — George Orwell

It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it. — George Orwell

Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats. — George Orwell

Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. — George Orwell

The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth. — George Orwell

Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal. — George Orwell

She was very young…she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing. — George Orwell

And to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse–hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life. — George Orwell

It is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it. — George Orwell

The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile. — George Orwell

Life is a moment–to–moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. — George Orwell

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. — George Orwell

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. — George Orwell

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