Words matter. These are the best George Orwell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
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.
Those who ‘abjure’ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
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.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
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.
Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
Big Brother is watching you.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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.
I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man.
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.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
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.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
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.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
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.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
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.
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.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
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.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
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.
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?
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.
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.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
