George Orwell Quotes

546 Sourced Quotes

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.

George Orwell
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

George Orwell
It had become usual to give Napoleon the Credit for every Successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!...

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
Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?

George Orwell
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

George Orwell
What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning.

George Orwell
We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

George Orwell
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

George Orwell
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

George Orwell
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

George Orwell
Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them … it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine.

George Orwell
She was very young...she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

George Orwell
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

George Orwell
To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.

George Orwell
In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

George Orwell
If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.

George Orwell
When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys

George Orwell
Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines.

George Orwell
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

George Orwell
I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

George Orwell
But is it really necessary, in 1947, to teach children to use expressions like "native" and "Chinaman"?

George Orwell
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

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

George Orwell
The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.

George Orwell