Quotes By George Orwell

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

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

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

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

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

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

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

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

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

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.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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

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 atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Big Brother is watching you.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

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.

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

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

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

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

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

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

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

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

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

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.