The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
– George Orwell
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
– George Orwell
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
– George Orwell
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
– 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
Football is war minus the shooting.
– 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
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
– 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
Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
– George Orwell
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on-that is, badly.
– George Orwell
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
– George Orwell
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
– George Orwell, 1984
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
– George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
– George Orwell
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
– 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
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 real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.
– George Orwell
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
– George Orwell
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
– George Orwell
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
– George Orwell
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
– George Orwell
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
– George Orwell
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
– George Orwell
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
– George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad.
– George Orwell
In the face of pain there are no heroes.
– George Orwell
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
– 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
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
Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.
– George Orwell
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
– George Orwell
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
– George Orwell
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
– George Orwell
Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
– George Orwell
Big Brother is Watching You.
– 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
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
The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.
– George Orwell
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
– George Orwell
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
– George Orwell