George Orwell quote: "A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you"

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political iss...
GEORGE ORWELL

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a r...
GEORGE ORWELL

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an...
GEORGE ORWELL

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
GEORGE ORWELL

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume...
GEORGE ORWELL

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of huma...
GEORGE ORWELL

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

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire t...
GEORGE ORWELL

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
GEORGE ORWELL

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
GEORGE ORWELL

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality...
GEORGE ORWELL

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
GEORGE ORWELL

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
GEORGE ORWELL

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually l...
GEORGE ORWELL

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a cr...
GEORGE ORWELL

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
GEORGE ORWELL

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exha...
GEORGE ORWELL

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
GEORGE ORWELL

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

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
GEORGE ORWELL

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
GEORGE ORWELL

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
GEORGE ORWELL

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequentl...
GEORGE ORWELL

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
GEORGE ORWELL

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
GEORGE ORWELL

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corpora...
GEORGE ORWELL

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

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one...
GEORGE ORWELL

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses t...
GEORGE ORWELL

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay egg...
GEORGE ORWELL

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defen...
GEORGE ORWELL

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of...
GEORGE ORWELL

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of al...
GEORGE ORWELL

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
GEORGE ORWELL

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

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one si...
GEORGE ORWELL

Big Brother is watching you.
GEORGE ORWELL

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
GEORGE ORWELL

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
GEORGE ORWELL

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
GEORGE ORWELL

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
GEORGE ORWELL

Good writing is like a windowpane.
GEORGE ORWELL

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
GEORGE ORWELL

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
GEORGE ORWELL

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing ...
GEORGE ORWELL

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in ...
GEORGE ORWELL

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than othe...
GEORGE ORWELL

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit f...
GEORGE ORWELL

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are ...
GEORGE ORWELL

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
GEORGE ORWELL

When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do ...
GEORGE ORWELL

I admit, too, that I felt a kind of horror as I looked at the people I was marching among. You canno...
GEORGE ORWELL

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

The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes
GEORGE ORWELL

It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over y...
GEORGE ORWELL

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. Y...
GEORGE ORWELL

Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out i...
GEORGE ORWELL

All animals are equalBut some animals are more equal than others
GEORGE ORWELL

WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
GEORGE ORWELL

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that f...
GEORGE ORWELL

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was ...
GEORGE ORWELL

In the face of pain there are no heroes.
GEORGE ORWELL

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
GEORGE ORWELL

Lo que opinen o dejen de opinar las masas se considera falto de importancia. Se les puede conceder l...
GEORGE ORWELL

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that pres...
GEORGE ORWELL

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructe...
GEORGE ORWELL

The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would yo...
GEORGE ORWELL

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
GEORGE ORWELL

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a w...
GEORGE ORWELL

The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel ...
GEORGE ORWELL

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayone...
GEORGE ORWELL

Mr Wells
GEORGE ORWELL

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about t...
GEORGE ORWELL

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writ...
GEORGE ORWELL

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
GEORGE ORWELL

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
GEORGE ORWELL

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one'...
GEORGE ORWELL

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
GEORGE ORWELL

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics --a cr...
GEORGE ORWELL

A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is...
GEORGE ORWELL

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect c...
GEORGE ORWELL

Quien controla el pasado —decía la consigna del Partido— controla el futu...
GEORGE ORWELL

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me--
GEORGE ORWELL

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O'Brien: Of course he exists.
Winston Smith: Does h...
GEORGE ORWELL

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
GEORGE ORWELL

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
GEORGE ORWELL

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

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
GEORGE ORWELL

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
GEORGE ORWELL

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their ...
GEORGE ORWELL

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
GEORGE ORWELL

Four legs good, two legs bad.
GEORGE ORWELL

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but al...
GEORGE ORWELL

The only good human being is a dead one.
GEORGE ORWELL

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted...
GEORGE ORWELL

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
GEORGE ORWELL

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
GEORGE ORWELL

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and a...
GEORGE ORWELL

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies ...
GEORGE ORWELL

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not...
GEORGE ORWELL

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
GEORGE ORWELL

The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from ...
GEORGE ORWELL

People have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't really accept you as o...
GEORGE ORWELL

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to co...
GEORGE ORWELL

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL

He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
GEORGE ORWELL

A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
GEORGE ORWELL

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good ac...
GEORGE ORWELL

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever wri...
GEORGE ORWELL

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
GEORGE ORWELL

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's d...
GEORGE ORWELL

For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or ...
GEORGE ORWELL

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personal...
GEORGE ORWELL

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to t...
GEORGE ORWELL

To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
GEORGE ORWELL

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
GEORGE ORWELL

The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always...
GEORGE ORWELL

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

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
GEORGE ORWELL

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Power is not a means; it is an end....
Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creat...
GEORGE ORWELL

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
GEORGE ORWELL

One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
GEORGE ORWELL

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
GEORGE ORWELL

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looki...
GEORGE ORWELL

The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement...
GEORGE ORWELL

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civi...
GEORGE ORWELL

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by ...
GEORGE ORWELL

By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
GEORGE ORWELL

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

You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those wh...
GEORGE ORWELL

Kipling sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilise...
GEORGE ORWELL

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
GEORGE ORWELL

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quie...
GEORGE ORWELL

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser th...
GEORGE ORWELL

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
GEORGE ORWELL

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL

Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give ...
GEORGE ORWELL

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's d...
GEORGE ORWELL

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent...
GEORGE ORWELL

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a goo...
GEORGE ORWELL

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents
GEORGE ORWELL

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Minds are like parachutes-- they only function when open. Thomas Dewar "Doublethink" means the pow...
GEORGE ORWELL

Insanity is my only means of relaxation
GEORGE ORWELL

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser t...
GEORGE ORWELL

For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
GEORGE ORWELL

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a re...
GEORGE ORWELL

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
GEORGE ORWELL

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
GEORGE ORWELL

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded
GEORGE ORWELL

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only ...
GEORGE ORWELL

But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an app...
GEORGE ORWELL

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

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or th...
GEORGE ORWELL

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Lov...
GEORGE ORWELL

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one...
GEORGE ORWELL

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equali...
GEORGE ORWELL

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, a...
GEORGE ORWELL

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the futu...
GEORGE ORWELL

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
GEORGE ORWELL

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men...
GEORGE ORWELL

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
GEORGE ORWELL

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
GEORGE ORWELL

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
GEORGE ORWELL

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
GEORGE ORWELL

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a re...
GEORGE ORWELL

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, ...
GEORGE ORWELL

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
GEORGE ORWELL

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
GEORGE ORWELL

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we be...
GEORGE ORWELL

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improve...
GEORGE ORWELL

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which i...
GEORGE ORWELL

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
GEORGE ORWELL

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
GEORGE ORWELL

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
GEORGE ORWELL

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
GEORGE ORWELL

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
GEORGE ORWELL

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser t...
GEORGE ORWELL

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
GEORGE ORWELL

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicte...
GEORGE ORWELL

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story...
GEORGE ORWELL

She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed
GEORGE ORWELL

The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally.
GEORGE ORWELL

Todos los animales son iguales, pero algunos son más iguales que otros.
GEORGE ORWELL

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their b...
GEORGE ORWELL

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

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personal...
GEORGE ORWELL

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and inte...
GEORGE ORWELL

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

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physi...
GEORGE ORWELL

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its ow...
GEORGE ORWELL

George Orwell

Share:

Related

More George Orwell