George Orwell Quotes

546 Sourced Quotes

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

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

George Orwell
A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is "weak," "sinful" and anxious for a "good time." 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. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.

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

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

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

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

George Orwell
'Who controls the past', ran the party slogan, 'controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past.'

George Orwell
Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have?

George Orwell
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

George Orwell
If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done, infallibly. One has come to believe in that as if it were a law of nature.

George Orwell
It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.

George Orwell
If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.

George Orwell
All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was "O. K., baby", the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print it.

George Orwell
As for [Stanley] Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air.

George Orwell
How right the working classes are in their "materialism." How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!

George Orwell
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

George Orwell
Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse—hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

George Orwell
Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

George Orwell
The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

George Orwell
The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

George Orwell
The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

George Orwell
The most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard" — which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all.

George Orwell
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.

George Orwell
It seemed queer, in the barber's shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited. "The Revolution has struck off our chains," the notice said. I felt like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back on again if they didn't look out.

George Orwell