Quotes By George Orwell

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

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.

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.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

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

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

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

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

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

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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

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.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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

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.

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

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.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

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.

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