George Orwell Quotes

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

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

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

Inequality was the price of civilization.

....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

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

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.

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 problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.

I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.

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.

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.

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

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

Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

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 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.

The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out: 'Swine! Swine! Swine!', and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.

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.

I have not betrayed Julia.

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

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O'Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O'Brien: You do not exist.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him)...

There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways.

A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within the sound of the guns.

It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.

a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.

The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.

[..] the great modern commandment - the eleventh commandment which has wiped out all the others: 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.

The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.

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 .

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.

No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.

And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

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

Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.

It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything – anything – but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.

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.

To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope.

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

Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.