George orwell quotes

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

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

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

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

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.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

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.

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

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.

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

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

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

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

One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

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

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

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

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose

Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.

Big Brother is watching you.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

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

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

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

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

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

Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.

True freedom is the right to say something that others don't want to hear.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.

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

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

The typical socialist... a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings.

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the robbery shall continue.

We have sunk so low it has become the obligation of every decent, thinking individual to re-state the obvious!

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.

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

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

Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution

There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions and tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled 'good' or 'bad'...By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

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

In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.

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 masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 % of the population exist.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.

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

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

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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

The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ' Socialism ' and ' Communism ' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask whose side I'm on.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

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

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.

The plant is blind but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will continue to do this in the face of endless discouragements.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.

Rich people are poor people with money.

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.

All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

Using clichés is a substitute for thinking

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.