Title Image - Quotes by Author George Orwell

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.

--George Orwell

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.

--George Orwell

Longer Version:

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.


Gambling, beer and football filled the horizons of their minds.

--George Orwell

Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.

--George Orwell

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invaria.

--George Orwell

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

--George Orwell

To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

--George Orwell

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

--George Orwell

The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

--George Orwell

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.

--George Orwell

Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.

--George Orwell

Public opinion is less tolerant than any system of law.

--George Orwell

Longer Version:

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


He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so .

--George Orwell

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.

--George Orwell

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

--George Orwell

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.

--George Orwell

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

--George Orwell

As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool -- and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.

--George Orwell

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on -- that is, badly.

--George Orwell

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

--George Orwell

It was soon noticed that when ever there was work to be done the cat could never be found.

--George Orwell

Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.

--George Orwell

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

--George Orwell

Longer Version:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.


If pacifists imagine that one can somehow overcome the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.

--George Orwell

What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.

--George Orwell

The heresy of heresies was common sense.

--George Orwell

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

--George Orwell

No man should be allowed to be the President who does not understand hogs, or hasn't been around a manure pile.

--George Orwell

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

--George Orwell

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

--George Orwell

Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.

--George Orwell

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

--George Orwell

Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.

--George Orwell

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.

--George Orwell

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

--George Orwell

Longer Version:

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.



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.

--George Orwell

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

--George Orwell

It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box.

--George Orwell

The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

--George Orwell

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ' Socialism ' and ' Communism ' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

--George Orwell

Vice is punished, but virtue is not rewarded.

--George Orwell

The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion.

--George Orwell

All nationalistic distinctions -- all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect -- are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

--George Orwell


To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

--George Orwell

The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.

--George Orwell

Modern man is rather like a bisected wasp which goes on sucking jam and pretends that the loss of its abdomen does not matter.

--George Orwell

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back.

--George Orwell

If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.

--George Orwell


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.

--George Orwell

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people -- the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

--George Orwell

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.

--George Orwell

It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?

--George Orwell

We believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does... unless conquered from the outside by military force?

--George Orwell

It is quite possible that in only seventy years our population will amount to about eleven millions, over half of whom will be old age pensioners.

--George Orwell



And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

--George Orwell

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

--George Orwell

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

--George Orwell

As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.

--George Orwell

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.

--George Orwell

The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.

--George Orwell


Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism -- robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

--George Orwell

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?

--George Orwell

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

--George Orwell

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.

--George Orwell

The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

--George Orwell

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

--George Orwell

This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

--George Orwell

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

--George Orwell





It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

--George Orwell

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

--George Orwell

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

--George Orwell


Waiters are seldom socialists.

--George Orwell

If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

--George Orwell

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