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George Orwell Quotes

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  • "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

  • "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

  • "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

  • "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

  • "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

  • "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

  • "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."
    - 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 seemed 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

  • "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 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 idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth."
    - 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 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 quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
    - George Orwell

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