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 Quote
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
- George Orwell Quote
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
- George Orwell Quote
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
- George Orwell Quote
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
- George Orwell Quote
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
- George Orwell Quote
Big Brother is watching you.
- George Orwell Quote
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
- George Orwell Quote
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
- George Orwell Quote
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
- George Orwell Quote
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell Quote
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
- George Orwell Quote
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
- George Orwell Quote
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.
- George Orwell Quote
Four legs good, two legs bad.
- George Orwell Quote
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
- George Orwell Quote
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
- George Orwell Quote
Good writing is like a windowpane.
- George Orwell Quote
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
- George Orwell Quote
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
- George Orwell Quote
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
- George Orwell Quote
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
- George Orwell Quote
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
- George Orwell Quote
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?
- George Orwell Quote
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
- George Orwell Quote
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell Quote
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
- George Orwell Quote
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
- George Orwell Quote
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
- George Orwell Quote
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
- George Orwell Quote
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
- George Orwell Quote
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
- George Orwell Quote
(Mankind) is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
- George Orwell Quote
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
- George Orwell Quote
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
- George Orwell Quote
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
- George Orwell Quote
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
- George Orwell Quote
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
- George Orwell Quote
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
- George Orwell Quote
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
- George Orwell Quote
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
- George Orwell Quote
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
- George Orwell Quote
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.
- George Orwell Quote
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
- George Orwell Quote
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
- George Orwell Quote
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
- George Orwell Quote
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.
- George Orwell Quote
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
- George Orwell Quote
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
- George Orwell Quote
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 Quote
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
- George Orwell Quote
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 Quote
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
- George Orwell Quote
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
- George Orwell Quote
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 Quote
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
- George Orwell Quote
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
- George Orwell Quote
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 Quote
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
- George Orwell Quote
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 Quote
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.
- George Orwell Quote
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
- George Orwell Quote
The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
- George Orwell Quote
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
- George Orwell Quote
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
- George Orwell Quote
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
- George Orwell Quote
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
- George Orwell Quote
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
- George Orwell Quote
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
- George Orwell Quote
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
- George Orwell Quote
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
- George Orwell Quote
We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
- George Orwell Quote
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
- George Orwell Quote
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
- George Orwell Quote
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 Quote
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
- George Orwell Quote
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
- George Orwell Quote
