Quotes By George Orwell

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.