George Orwell quotes

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

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

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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

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?

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

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

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

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

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

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

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.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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

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

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

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

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 best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

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

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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

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

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

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

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.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

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

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

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

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

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

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

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

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

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

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

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.