Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

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

— George Orwell

452. “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

453. “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

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

— George Orwell

455. “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

456. “Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

458. “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

459. “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

460. “I will work harder!”

— George Orwell

461. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

464. “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

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

— George Orwell

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

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

— George Orwell

470. “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

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

— George Orwell

472. “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

473. “All animals are equal.”

— George Orwell

474. “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

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

— George Orwell

476. “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

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

— George Orwell

478. “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

479. “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

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

— George Orwell

481. “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

482. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

485. “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

486. “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

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

— George Orwell

488. “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

489. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

492. “Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?”

— George Orwell

493. “Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.”

— George Orwell

494. “And when memory failed and written records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.”

— George Orwell

495. “It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply it’s bareness, it’s dinginess, it’s listlessness.”

— George Orwell

496. “Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.”

— George Orwell

497. “There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.”

— George Orwell

498. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.” “Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

— George Orwell

499. “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”

— George Orwell

500. “Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.”

— George Orwell