Quotes By George Orwell

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

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

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

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

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

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

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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

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.

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

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

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

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.