Quotes By George Orwell

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

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

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

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

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

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

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

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

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

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

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

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

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

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

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

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

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

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

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

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

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.