Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.”

— George Orwell

452. “Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.”

— George Orwell

453. “Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.”

— George Orwell

454. “There will be no art, no literature, no science.”

— George Orwell

455. “People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? ‘Natural’ death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.”

— George Orwell

456. “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”

— George Orwell

457. “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”

— George Orwell

458. “The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged.”

— George Orwell

459. “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.”

— George Orwell

460. “Los mejores libros son los que nos dicen lo que ya sabemos.”

— George Orwell

461. “I will work harder!”

— George Orwell

462. “Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”

— George Orwell

463. “Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”

— George Orwell

464. “We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.”

— George Orwell

465. “Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.”

— George Orwell

466. “The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.”

— George Orwell

467. “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country – it is not the same in all countries: it was not so in republican France, and it is not so in the USA today – it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect:.”

— George Orwell

468. “Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

— George Orwell

469. “Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

— George Orwell

470. “Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own.”

— George Orwell

471. “For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?”

— George Orwell

472. “Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”

— George Orwell

473. “Most people want to be good, but not that good and not all the time.”

— George Orwell

474. “Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.”

— George Orwell

475. “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”

— George Orwell

476. “Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or fountain pen.”

— George Orwell

477. “War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comforable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

— George Orwell

478. “I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

— George Orwell

479. “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban... 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 highbrow periodicals.”

— George Orwell

480. “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.”

— George Orwell

481. “Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. Now.”

— George Orwell

482. “All animals are equal.”

— George Orwell

483. “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.”

— George Orwell

484. “Boxer was an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together.”

— George Orwell

485. “A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.”

— George Orwell

486. “Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.”

— George Orwell

487. “We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.”

— George Orwell

488. “Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip. But the really well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no whip-.”

— George Orwell

489. “The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”

— George Orwell

490. “A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world – which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools.”

— George Orwell

491. “The party is not concerned with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, providing that the hierarchical structure always remains the same.”

— George Orwell

492. “So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”

— George Orwell

493. “If there really is such a thing as turning in one’s grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.”

— George Orwell

494. “Comrades,” he said, “I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal.”

— George Orwell

495. “Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal.”

— George Orwell

496. “I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!”

— George Orwell

Featured in: Country Quotes

497. “I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”

— George Orwell

498. “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.”

— George Orwell

499. “Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.”

— George Orwell

500. “He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.”

— George Orwell