Quotes by George Orwell

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Big Brother is watching you.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

At age fifty, every man has the face he deserves.

The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.

Manchester is the belly and guts of the nation.

Our windmill was ruined. Our spirits were at their lowest. But, Napoleon seemed... triumphant.

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.

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

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

According to Buddhist belief, those who have done evil in their lives will spend the next incarntation in the shape of a rat, a frog or some other low animal.

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

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.

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

Perhaps the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better.

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education.

What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.

The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

An earthquake is such fun when it is over.

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.

Don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest.

If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.

In the better light of the living room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.

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.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.

One does not
establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictator-
ship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of
torture is torture. The object of power is power.

He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.

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

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

Few people have the guts to say outright that art and propaganda are the same thing.

As for queueing-up, during the past five or ten years it has become what the psychologists call a conditioned reflex. If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue almost instinctively.

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him... A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.

Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.

Empire --  in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting coloured labor.

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.

To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions.

They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you.

It England is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.

His eye fell upon the aspidistra. Two years he had inhabited this vile room; two mortal years in which nothing had been accomplished.

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.

During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces.

It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

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

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

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

Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.

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.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

But of course it was an American paper. The Americans always go one better on any kinds of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering, or theosophy.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

Between pigs and human beings there was not and there need not be any clash of interest whatsoever.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

Then he suddenly lifted his leg, urinated over the plans, and walked out without uttering a word.

Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published -- the rest is just public relations.

All art is propaganda.

The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.

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

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

If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.

It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

After all, that is what the merely casual onlooker always sees -- the outward appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of things. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the landscape.

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 .

You want a picture of the future? Imagine a boot trampling a human face.. forever. The moral to be drawn from this nightmarish situation is simple: Don't let it happen. It depends on you.

Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness.

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?

Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

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

If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.

Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.

The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club.

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

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

There is always one escape: into wickedness.

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

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

I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.