Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism.
His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in industrial Northern England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell’s work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective “Orwellian” – describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices – is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Room 101”, “Newspeak”, “memory hole”, “doublethink”, and “thoughtcrime”.
Some of the best quotes from George Orwell are listed below.
- “A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.” – George Orwell
- “A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.” – George Orwell
- “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” – George Orwell
- “All art is propaganda; on the other hand, not all propaganda is art.” – George Orwell
- “All human relationships must be purchased with money.” – George Orwell
- “All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.” – George Orwell
- “All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.” – George Orwell
- “All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.” – George Orwell
- “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” – George Orwell
- “All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” – George Orwell
- “Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.” – George Orwell
- “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” – George Orwell
- “As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.” – George Orwell
- “At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.” – George Orwell
- “Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.” – George Orwell
- “Big Brother is watching you.” – George Orwell
- “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” – George Orwell
- “Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.” – George Orwell
- “Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.” – George Orwell
- “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.” – George Orwell
- “Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.” – George Orwell
- “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.” – George Orwell
- “Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.” – 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.” – George Orwell
- “Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats.” – 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.” – George Orwell
- “For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.” – George Orwell
- “Four legs good, two legs bad.” – George Orwell
- “Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.” – George Orwell
- “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” – George Orwell
- “Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell
- “Gambling, beer and football filled the horizons of their minds.” – George Orwell
- “Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.” – George Orwell
- “Good writing is like a windowpane.” – George Orwell
- “Happiness can exist only in acceptance.” – George Orwell
- “He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.” – George Orwell
- “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” – George Orwell
- “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell
- “However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.” – George Orwell
- “I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.” – George Orwell
- “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.” – George Orwell
- “I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY.” – George Orwell
- “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell
- “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” – George Orwell
- “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” – George Orwell
- “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” – George Orwell
- “If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.” – George Orwell
- “I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man.” – George Orwell
- “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
- “In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” – George Orwell
- “In the face of pain there are no heroes.” – George Orwell
- “It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith – as mysterious as faith itself.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “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
- “It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.” – George Orwell
- “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell
- “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” – George Orwell
- “It’s frightful that people who are so ignorant have so much influence.” – George Orwell
- “It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other.” – George Orwell
- “Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.” – George Orwell
- “Liberal: a power worshipper without power.” – George Orwell
- “Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.” – 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.” – George Orwell
- “Manchester is the belly and guts of the nation.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “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
- “Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.” – George Orwell
- “Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.” – George Orwell
- “Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.” – George Orwell
- “Myths which are believed in tend to become true.” – George Orwell
- “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.” – George Orwell
- “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” – George Orwell
- “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” – George Orwell
- “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.” – George Orwell
- “No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.” – George Orwell
- “No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.” – George Orwell
- “Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.” – George Orwell
- “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.” – George Orwell
- “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” – George Orwell
- “One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.” – George Orwell
- “One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.” – George Orwell
- “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.” – George Orwell
- “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.” – George Orwell
- “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” – George Orwell
- “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” – George Orwell
- “Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.” – George Orwell
- “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” – George Orwell
- “Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.” – George Orwell
- “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” – 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.” – George Orwell
- “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.” – George Orwell
- “Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.” – George Orwell
- “Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.” – George Orwell
- “Rich people are poor people with money.” – George Orwell
- “Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.” – George Orwell
- “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.” – George Orwell
- “Sanity is not statistical.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “Serious sport is war minus the shooting.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.” – George Orwell
- “Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.” – George Orwell
- “Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.” – George Orwell
- “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “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
- “The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.” – George Orwell
- “The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.” – George Orwell
- “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.” – George Orwell
- “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.” – George Orwell
- “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “The heresy of heresies was common sense.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.” – George Orwell
- “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” – George Orwell
- “The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.” – George Orwell
- “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” – George Orwell
- “The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.” – George Orwell
- “The secret of a successful restaurant is sharp knives.” – George Orwell
- “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” – George Orwell
- “The war is not meant to be won; it is meant to be continuous.” – George Orwell
- “There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” – George Orwell
- “There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.” – George Orwell
- “There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.” – George Orwell
- “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.” – George Orwell
- “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” – George Orwell
- “To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.” – George Orwell
- “To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.” – George Orwell
- “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” – George Orwell
- “To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.” – George Orwell
- “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.” – George Orwell
- “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me.” – George Orwell
- “War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.” – George Orwell
- “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” – George Orwell
- “War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.” – George Orwell
- “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” – George Orwell
- “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” – George Orwell
- “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.” – George Orwell
- “We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.” – George Orwell
- “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “Weakness is strength.” – George Orwell
- “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
- “Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.” – George Orwell
- “When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.” – George Orwell
- “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell
- “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” – George Orwell
- “Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on – that is, badly.” – George Orwell
- “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” – 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.” – George Orwell
- “You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.” – George Orwell