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.

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

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

Windmill or no windmill, he said life would go on as it has always gone on—that is, badly.

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.

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.

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

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.

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.

The secret of a successful restaurant is sharp knives.

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.

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.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

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

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.

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

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.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

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.

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into.

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.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

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.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

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

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

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

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.

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.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

Im fat but Im thin inside... theres a thin man inside every fat man.

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!

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

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.

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

The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.

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

A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

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.

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

An earthquake is such fun when it is over.

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.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

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

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

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.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Big Brother is watching you.

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Writing a novel is agony.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

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.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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.

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

During times of universal deceit telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

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

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

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

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.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

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.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.