George Orwell (1903–1950), was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Here is A selection of some of George Orwell most famous quotes: George Orwell Quotes 1984. George Orwell Quotes About Love, War, Truth, Power and Politics.
George Orwell Quotes and Sayings
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
The only good human being is a dead one.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
Sanity is not statistical.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
You are a slow learner, Winston. How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
To die hating them, that was freedom.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
In the face of pain there are no heroes.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with 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.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
Big Brother is Watching You.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?
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.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.
The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?
To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man - greetings!
A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices.
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
You're only a rebel from the waist downwards, - he told her.
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.
All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on-that is, badly.
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.
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
The end was contained in the beginning.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, I'm a free man in here - he tapped his forehead - and you're all right.
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The stars are a free show; it don't cost anything to use your eyes.
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.
You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
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