Quotes By George Orwell

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?

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

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.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

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.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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