Quotes by George Orwell

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Big Brother is watching you.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

At age fifty, every man has the face he deserves.

The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.

Manchester is the belly and guts of the nation.

Our windmill was ruined. Our spirits were at their lowest. But, Napoleon seemed... triumphant.

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.

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

According to Buddhist belief, those who have done evil in their lives will spend the next incarntation in the shape of a rat, a frog or some other low animal.

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

Perhaps the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better.

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education.

What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.

The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

An earthquake is such fun when it is over.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

Don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest.

If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.

In the better light of the living room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.

With its grace and carelessness, it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though all could be swept into a nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.

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.

One does not
establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution;
one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictator-
ship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of
torture is torture. The object of power is power.

He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

Few people have the guts to say outright that art and propaganda are the same thing.

As for queueing-up, during the past five or ten years it has become what the psychologists call a conditioned reflex. If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue almost instinctively.

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him... A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.

Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.

Empire --  in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting coloured labor.

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.

To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions.

They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you.

It England is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.

His eye fell upon the aspidistra. Two years he had inhabited this vile room; two mortal years in which nothing had been accomplished.

When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist -- after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.

During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces.

It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.

Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.

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.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

But of course it was an American paper. The Americans always go one better on any kinds of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering, or theosophy.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

Between pigs and human beings there was not and there need not be any clash of interest whatsoever.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

Then he suddenly lifted his leg, urinated over the plans, and walked out without uttering a word.

Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published -- the rest is just public relations.

All art is propaganda.

The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.

It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

After all, that is what the merely casual onlooker always sees -- the outward appearance, the non-functional, the surfaces of things. No one who is really involved in the landscape ever sees the landscape.

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 .

You want a picture of the future? Imagine a boot trampling a human face.. forever. The moral to be drawn from this nightmarish situation is simple: Don't let it happen. It depends on you.

Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness.

Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?

Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.

If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.

Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.

The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club.

A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

There is always one escape: into wickedness.

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

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

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.

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

They clichés will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.

Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody.

But every writer, especially every novelist, has a 'message,' whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.

I have managed to make the Capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against Capitalism.

The Victorian happy ending -- a vision of a huge loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wildflowers... the red buses, the blue policemen -- all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.

A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as robust.

The class-struggle is the main source of progress, and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman.

We were once told that the aeroplane had abolished frontiers; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.

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.

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop.

Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.

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

Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major's speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.

Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

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.

Like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

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?

Freedom of the Press,
if it means anything at all,
means the freedom
to criticize and oppose.

It is quite true that it is wasteful, messy and the cause of avoidable work: all the same things could be said with equal truth of a baby.

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham.

Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades, cried Squealer almost pleadingly.

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

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.

The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.

From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

Imperialism as he Kipling sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

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

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.

The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith--as mysterious as faith itself.

The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle World War II, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.

The only good human being is a dead one.

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.

England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.

His answer to every problem, every setback was I will work harder! --which he had adopted as his personal motto.

How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.

Reality is inside the skull.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.

I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.

As time went on, the Communists and the POUM wrote more bitterly about one another than about the Fascists.

Glory of war, indeed! In war, all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae -- every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.

In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last.

In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.

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

Gambling, beer and football filled the horizons of their minds.

Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invaria.

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

To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.

Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.