George Orwell Quotes

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

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

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

Big Brother is watching you.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

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

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.

It is only when you meet someoneof a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your ownbeliefs really are.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?

It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

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

And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer.

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.

We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf"--Opening to "My Father's Son, " attributed to George Orwell

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

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

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. All issues are political issues.

England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.

…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.

International sport is war without shooting.

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

With its grace and carelessness, it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though [all] could be swept into a nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.

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

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

There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

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

Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?

If all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.

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

Before the war and especially before the Boer War it was summer all the year round.

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

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

...In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain.

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

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time