Best George Orwell Quotes

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

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

A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

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.

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.

For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

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.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.

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

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

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.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

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

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics --a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage --surely that proves that you are in the right?

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

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.

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.

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.

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

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

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

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).