There are many famous George Orwell quotes available all over the internet. So I have put together a collection of top quotes to save your time. I have also added a short bio of George Orwell. Let’s start!
George Orwell: English Author and Journalist
George Orwell was a famous author, critic, and essayist. He was also famous as a journalist. He’s a robust struggling person.
Early life: His full name is Eric Arthur Blair. Born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, His father was an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service. He returned to England at a very early age. However, completing the study, he returned to India and joined the Indian Imperial Police.
Career challenges: He worked in India for five years. But he hated the British imperialism. So he left the job. Then he shifted to Paris. Again he moved to Britain. In the meantime, he published his first poem Down and Out in Paris and London. He was teaching at that time. But he left the job. In 1939, he joined British Broadcasting Corporation. His book Animal Farm and 1984 are one of the best literature books of history. His ambition was to make political writing into the arts. He wrote for 17 years. He died on February 21, 1950.
Achievements: He got many awards as the recognition of his outstanding works:
- Prometheus Hall of Fame Award- 2011, 1984: Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Retro Hugo Award for Best Novella 1996 Animal Farm.
- Science Fiction Hall of Fame
- Locus Awards and Poll
- Prometheus Awards
- Retro Hugo Awards
He wrote many professional articles. Aside, he has footstep in literature. For his contribution, he’s one of the best non-fictional writers.
Top George Orwell Quotes
“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”
“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.”
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”
“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.”
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”
“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”
“I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man.”
“No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.”
“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”
“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.”
“Good writing is like a windowpane.”
“Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”
“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.”
“War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.”
“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“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.”
“The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.”
“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.”
“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?”
“To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
“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.”
“He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.”
“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
“For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.”
“I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”
“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.”
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
“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.”
“Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
“As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”
“In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”
“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
“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.”
“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.”
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
“Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”
“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?”
“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
“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.”
“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”
“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.”
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”
“A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”
“Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.”
“Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.”
“We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.”
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“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.”
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
“To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.”
“Big Brother is watching you.”
“I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.”
“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.”
“On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.”
“Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.”
“The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”
“Those who ‘abjure’ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.”
“Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.”
“Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”
“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”
“War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.”
“Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
“No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.”
“When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
“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.”
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”
“One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.”
“Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”
“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.”
“At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.”
“A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”
“The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.”
“War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.”
“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.”
“Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.”
“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.”
I hope this list of George Orwell quotes was helpful. Let us know if you have any quote requirements. Till then, happy reading!
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