George Orwell Quotes

The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.

Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

it was only a hopeless fantasy, it passed like an april day, but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred they have stolen my heart away.

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.

Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why 'liberal' capitalist opinion took the same line.

Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning.

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

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?

Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image.

The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men

Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness.

The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.

Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

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

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

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.

you can't live life without consequences. They occur regardless of the decision. A consequence is an outcome, good or bad. You can live life without regrets and thats what makes it worth it. Or you could live with regret and end up hanging yourself but thats still good. You paid for the rope so your feeding someones family. Something to be proud of before you kick the bucket

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing

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.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist

I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is.

All men are enemies. All animals are comrades

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.

Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

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.

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?