George Orwell Quotes

It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box

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?

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

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

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

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

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.

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives but on balance life is suffering and only the very sound or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

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

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

Liberal - a power worshipper without power.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

International sport is war without shooting.

Who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past.

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.

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.

We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.

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.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

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