Quotes By George Orwell

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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.

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.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

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?

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

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?

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.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

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.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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

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.