George Orwell Quotes

546 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

George Orwell
It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.

George Orwell
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

George Orwell
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell
There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.

George Orwell
All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

George Orwell
A dirty joke is not... a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

George Orwell
A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

George Orwell
The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

George Orwell
The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

George Orwell
To the well-fed it seems cowardly to complain of tight boots, because the well-fed live in a different world-a world where, if your boots are tight, you can change them; their minds are not warped by petty discomfort. But below a certain income the petty crowds the large out of existence; one's preoccupation is not with art or religion, but with bad food, hard beds, drudgery and the sack. Serenity is impossible to a poor man in a cold country and even his active thoughts will go in more or less sterile complaint.

George Orwell
Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?

George Orwell
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

George Orwell
Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

George Orwell
Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

George Orwell
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

George Orwell
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.

George Orwell
The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.

George Orwell
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

George Orwell
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.

George Orwell
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side.

George Orwell
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.

George Orwell
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

George Orwell