George Orwell Quotes

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.

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.

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

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .

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.

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.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

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

Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

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.

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

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

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.

True freedom is the right to say something that others don't want to hear.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

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.

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

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

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.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

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

Reality is inside the skull.

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature

When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys

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.

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.

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.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

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.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.