Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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3. “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

4. “Big Brother is watching you.”

— George Orwell

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5. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

10. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

— George Orwell

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11. “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”

— George Orwell

12. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

— George Orwell

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13. “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

— George Orwell

14. “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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16. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

— George Orwell

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17. “Sanity is not statistical.”

— George Orwell

18. “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

20. “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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22. “Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

24. “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

— George Orwell

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25. “Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.”

— George Orwell

26. “The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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29. “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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32. “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

34. “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.”

— George Orwell

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35. “If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.”

— George Orwell

36. “Rich people are poor people with money.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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39. “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”

— George Orwell

40. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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42. “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.”

— George Orwell

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43. “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.”

— George Orwell

44. “I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY.”

— George Orwell

45. “In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

— George Orwell

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46. “The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.”

— George Orwell

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47. “You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

— George Orwell

48. “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

— George Orwell

49. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

— George Orwell

50. “He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”

— George Orwell

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