Best George Orwell Quotes

George Orwell was an English author, journalist, essayist as well as critic. He was well known for his popular novels Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm. Some of the famous quotes by Gorge Orwell are listed here.

1. “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.” - George Orwell
2. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” - George Orwell
3. “Four legs good, two legs bad.” - George Orwell
4. “One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.” - George Orwell
5. “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.” - George Orwell
6. “To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.” - George Orwell
7. “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
8. “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.” - George Orwell
9. “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
10. “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
11. “To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.” - George Orwell
12. “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
13. “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” - George Orwell
14. “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
15. “In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer…”- George Orwell
16. “Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.” - George Orwell
17. “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
18. “To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.” - George Orwell
19. “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.” - George Orwell
20. “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” - George Orwell
21. “A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.” - George Orwell
22. “War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.” - George Orwell
23. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” - George Orwell
24. “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” - George Orwell
25. “Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness” - George Orwell
26. “A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.” - George Orwell
27. “To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.” - George Orwell
28. “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
29. “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
30. “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” - George Orwell
31. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” - George Orwell
32. “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.” - George Orwell
33. “Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.” - George Orwell
34. “The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.” - George Orwell
35. “For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.” - George Orwell
36. “He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).” - George Orwell
37. “But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.” - George Orwell
38. “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” - George Orwell
39. “The existence of good bad literature -the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously -is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.” - George Orwell
40. “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
41. “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
42. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” - George Orwell
43. “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
44. “For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.” - George Orwell
45. “Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.” - George Orwell
46. “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” - George Orwell
47. “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
48. “The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.” - George Orwell
49. “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
50. “Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.” - George Orwell
51. “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
52. “No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.” - George Orwell
53. “Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.” - George Orwell
54. “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.” - George Orwell
55. “Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.” - George Orwell
56. “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” - George Orwell
57. “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
58. “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
59. “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
60. “No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.” - George Orwell
61. “Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” - George Orwell
62. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” - George Orwell
63. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” - George Orwell
64. “The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.” - George Orwell
65. “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” - George Orwell
66. “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” - George Orwell
67. “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
68. “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” - George Orwell
69. “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” - George Orwell
70. “Myths which are believed in tend to become true.” - George Orwell
71. “In every one of those little stucco boxes there’s some poor bastard who’s never free except when he’s fast asleep and dreaming that he’s got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.” - George Orwell
72. “Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.” - George Orwell
73. “The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.” - George Orwell
74. “One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.” - George Orwell
75. “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.” - George Orwell
76. “The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.” - George Orwell
77. “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
78. “The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.” - George Orwell
79. “Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism — robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.” - George Orwell
80. “Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.” - George Orwell

Exceeding were few of the top quotes by George Orwell, we hope that you must have enjoyed reading them. If you have more of his quotes do share the same in the comments section.