George Orwell Quotes

The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity.

Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

The secret of a successful restaurant is sharp knives.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

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

Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.

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

You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.

[Political] 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.

I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

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

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

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

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.

The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.

The belly comes before the soul.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

they say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.

Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ... War is Peace.

There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.

Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.

In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.