Quotes By George Orwell

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

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

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.