George Orwell Quotes

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

Using clichés is a substitute for thinking

Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

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

Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

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

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

Does Big Brother exist?" "Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party." "Does he exist in the same way as I exist?" "You do not exist.

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside

In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.

Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

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

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

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.

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children

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

Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.

Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

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.