Quotes by George Orwell (Page 3 of 3)

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

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

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

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

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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 very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.