Quotes By George Orwell

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

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.

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

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

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.