Quotes by George Orwell

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.

The existence of good bad literature--the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously--is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

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.

They clichés will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

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.

Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody.

But every writer, especially every novelist, has a 'message,' whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.

I have managed to make the Capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against Capitalism.

The Victorian happy ending -- a vision of a huge loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wildflowers... the red buses, the blue policemen -- all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.

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

The class-struggle is the main source of progress, and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman.

We were once told that the aeroplane had abolished frontiers; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions -- racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war -- which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

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

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop.

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

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

Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major's speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.

Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

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

The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

Like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

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.

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

Freedom of the Press,
if it means anything at all,
means the freedom
to criticize and oppose.

It is quite true that it is wasteful, messy and the cause of avoidable work: all the same things could be said with equal truth of a baby.

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham.

Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades, cried Squealer almost pleadingly.

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.

The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.

The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.