George Orwell Quotes

You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.

There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.

The English are probably more capable than most peoples of making revolutionary change without bloodshed. In England, if anywhere,it would be possible to abolish poverty without destroying liberty.

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.

A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men

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

A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as "robust.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.

All men are enemies. All animals are comrades

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

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

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

If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

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

There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.

All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

All art is propaganda; on the other hand, not all propaganda is art.

When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state - however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.

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.

All art is propaganda.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

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.

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.

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.

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

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.