Quotes by George Orwell

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
– George Orwell

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.
– George Orwell

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
– George Orwell

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

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
– George Orwell

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
– George Orwell

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
– George Orwell

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
– George Orwell

The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.
– George Orwell

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
– George Orwell

Four legs good, two legs bad.
– George Orwell

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
– George Orwell

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
– George Orwell

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
– George Orwell

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
– George Orwell

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
– George Orwell

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
– George Orwell

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
– George Orwell

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
– George Orwell

Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.
– George Orwell

Football is war minus the shooting.
– George Orwell

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
– George Orwell

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
– George Orwell

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
– George Orwell

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on–that is, badly.
– George Orwell

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
– George Orwell

Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
– George Orwell

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
– George Orwell

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.
– George Orwell

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
– George Orwell