Quotes By George Orwell

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

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

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.

Big Brother is watching you.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

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.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

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.

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.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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

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

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.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

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

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.

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

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.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.