100 Quotes by George Orwell
George Orwell, an English novelist, essayist, and journalist, is renowned for his insightful and often prophetic writings that examine the dangers of totalitarianism, censorship, and the abuse of power. His works, including "1984" and "Animal Farm," have become iconic representations of dystopian literature, warning against the erosion of individual freedom and the manipulation of truth by authoritarian regimes. Orwell's clear and concise writing style, coupled with his keen social commentary, has made his works both accessible and thought-provoking. He tackled complex political and ethical issues head-on, highlighting the potential consequences of unchecked government control and the distortion of language. Orwell's contributions to literature have left an enduring impact, resonating with readers as a reminder of the importance of vigilance in safeguarding democratic values.
George Orwell Quotes
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. (Meaning)
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. (Quote Meaning)
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. (Meaning)
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. (Quote Meaning)
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. (Meaning)
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. (Quote Meaning)
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. (Meaning)
In time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. (Quote Meaning)
War is peace. (Meaning)
Ignorance is strength. (Quote Meaning)
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. (Meaning)
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. (Quote Meaning)
Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.
Who controls the past controls the future. (Meaning)
Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. (Quote Meaning)
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. (Meaning)
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language
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.
In our age, there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues. (Quote Meaning)
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
Freedom is slavery. (Meaning)
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.
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
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.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. (Quote Meaning)
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. (Meaning)
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. (Quote Meaning)
Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.
It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
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?
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask whose side I'm on.
By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions and tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled 'good' or 'bad'...By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.
The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion.
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.
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.
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.
Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. (Meaning)
In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.
Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
True freedom is the right to say something that others don't want to hear.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
The point is that 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. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
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.
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature
A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
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.
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule , between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world : that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war , which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.
We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.
Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.
Using clichés is a substitute for thinking
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.
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside
In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.
To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
The object of power is power.
A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.
Big Brother is watching you.
The typical socialist: a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings.
There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.
You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.
You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
The plant is blind but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will continue to do this in the face of endless discouragements.
The heresy of heresies was common sense.
― George Orwell Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
