George Orwell Quotes

546 Sourced Quotes

As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.

George Orwell
The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.

George Orwell
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.

George Orwell
One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

George Orwell
It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

George Orwell
In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

George Orwell
In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science.' The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.

George Orwell
Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.

George Orwell
During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen.

George Orwell
At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.

George Orwell
All art is propaganda; on the other hand, not all propaganda is art.

George Orwell
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.

George Orwell
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.

George Orwell
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

George Orwell
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?

George Orwell
I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!

George Orwell
The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

George Orwell
I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.

George Orwell
I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.

George Orwell
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.

George Orwell
The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men

George Orwell