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George Orwell

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Quotes
166

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
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
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
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
Windmill or no windmill, he said life would go on as it has always gone on—that is, badly.
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 of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
George Orwell
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
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.
George Orwell
For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
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
The secret of a successful restaurant is sharp knives.
George Orwell
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.
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
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
George Orwell
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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
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
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
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
Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.
George Orwell
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
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
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
George Orwell
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
George Orwell
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
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
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
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
For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell
One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
George Orwell
A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into.
George Orwell
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish inconvenient minorities will be persecuted even if laws exist to protect them.
George Orwell
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
George Orwell
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
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
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.
George Orwell
Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
George Orwell
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
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
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
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
George Orwell
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
George Orwell
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
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
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
George Orwell
Im fat but Im thin inside... theres a thin man inside every fat man.
George Orwell
They say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!
George Orwell
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
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
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
George Orwell
The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.
George Orwell
Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue.
George Orwell
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
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.
George Orwell
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
George Orwell
An earthquake is such fun when it is over.
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
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
George Orwell
Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.
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
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
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
George Orwell
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
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.
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 peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell
Big Brother is watching you.
George Orwell
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.
George Orwell
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
George Orwell
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
George Orwell
Writing a novel is agony.
George Orwell
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
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
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
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
Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.
George Orwell
Good writing is like a windowpane.
George Orwell
During times of universal deceit telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act
George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell
A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
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
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
George Orwell
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
George Orwell
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
George Orwell
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
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
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
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
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
George Orwell

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