George Orwell (1903–1950), was an English novelist, essayist, journalist,
and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism,
opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian
novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Here is A selection of some of George Orwell most famous quotes. George
Orwell Quotes 1984. George Orwell Quotes About Love, War, Truth, Power and
Politics.
George Orwell Famous Quotes & Sayings
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.一>George Orwell
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.一>George Orwell
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.一>George Orwell
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.一>George Orwell
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.一>George Orwell
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?一>George Orwell
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.一>George Orwell
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.一>George Orwell
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.一>George Orwell
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.一>George Orwell
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.一>George Orwell
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.一>George Orwell
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.一>George Orwell
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.一>George Orwell
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.一>George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad.一>George Orwell
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.一>George Orwell
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.一>George Orwell
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.一>George Orwell
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.一>George Orwell
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.一>George Orwell
The only good human being is a dead one.一>George Orwell
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.一>George Orwell
Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.一>George Orwell
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.一>George Orwell
Sanity is not statistical.一>George Orwell
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.一>George Orwell
You are a slow learner, Winston. How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.一>George Orwell
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.一>George Orwell
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?一>George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.一>George Orwell
To die hating them, that was freedom.一>George Orwell
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.一>George Orwell
Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.一>George Orwell
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.一>George Orwell
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.一>George Orwell
In the face of pain there are no heroes.一>George Orwell
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.一>George Orwell
If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.一>George Orwell
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?一>George Orwell
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.一>George Orwell
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.一>George Orwell
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.一>George Orwell
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.一>George Orwell
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.一>George Orwell
No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?一>George Orwell
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.一>George Orwell
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.一>George Orwell
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.一>George Orwell
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.一>George Orwell
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.一>George Orwell
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.一>George Orwell
Big Brother is Watching You.一>George Orwell
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.一>George Orwell
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.一>George Orwell
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.一>George Orwell
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.一>George Orwell
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.一>George Orwell
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.一>George Orwell
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.一>George Orwell
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.一>George Orwell
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.一>George Orwell
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.一>George Orwell
Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.一>George Orwell
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.一>George Orwell
In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.一>George Orwell
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.一>George Orwell
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.一>George Orwell
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.一>George Orwell
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?一>George Orwell
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.一>George Orwell
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.一>George Orwell
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.一>George Orwell
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. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.一>George Orwell
Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?一>George Orwell
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.一>George Orwell
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.一>George Orwell
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.一>George Orwell
The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.一>George Orwell
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.一>George Orwell
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?一>George Orwell
To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man - greetings!一>George Orwell
A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices.一>George Orwell
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.一>George Orwell
You're only a rebel from the waist downwards, - he told her.一>George Orwell
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.一>George Orwell
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.一>George Orwell
But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.一>George Orwell
The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.一>George Orwell
All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.一>George Orwell
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.一>George Orwell
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on一that is, badly.一>George Orwell
The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.一>George Orwell
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.一>George Orwell
The end was contained in the beginning.一>George Orwell
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.一>George Orwell
If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, I'm a free man in here - he tapped his forehead - and you're all right.一>George Orwell
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.一>George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.一>George Orwell
The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.一>George Orwell
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.一>George Orwell
You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.一>George Orwell
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.一>George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.一>George Orwell
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.一>George Orwell
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