authors The Best George Orwell Quotes  

Reference

991 votes 217 voters 25.2k views 77 items Follow Embed

List Rules Must be a famous or well-known quote. If a quote is cut off you can hover over the text to see the full quote.

1

27 1

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

2

41 4

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. George Orwell

3

27 2

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. George Orwell

4

19 1

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. George Orwell

5

41 6

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

6

29 3

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

7

28 3

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up. George Orwell

8

23 2

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. George Orwell

9

17 1

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. George Orwell

10

31 4

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

11

9 0

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. George Orwell

12

15 1

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay. George Orwell

13

20 2

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

14

33 6

A liberal is a power worshipper without the power. George Orwell

15

27 4

Four legs good, two legs bad. George Orwell

16

23 3

WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. George Orwell

17

13 1

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. George Orwell

18

17 2

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

19

16 2

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. George Orwell

20

15 2

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? George Orwell

21

17 4

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever. George Orwell

22

11 1

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. George Orwell

23

11 1

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

24

14 2

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. George Orwell

25

13 2

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. George Orwell

26

13 2

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

27

6 0

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. George Orwell

28

10 1

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. George Orwell

29

10 1

Throughout recorded time... there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. George Orwell

30

10 1

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

31

12 3

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

32

9 1

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

33

10 2

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. George Orwell

34

13 5

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

35

8 1

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

36

8 1

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

37

9 2

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. George Orwell

38

9 2

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

39

10 4

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

40

6 1

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. George Orwell

41

6 1

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. George Orwell

42

6 1

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. George Orwell

43

6 1

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. George Orwell

44

8 4

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility. George Orwell

45

7 3

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. George Orwell

46

6 2

Myths which are believed in tend to become true. George Orwell

47

5 1

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. George Orwell

48

5 1

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. George Orwell

49

5 1

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. George Orwell

50

5 1

All animals are equalBut some animals are more equal than others George Orwell