Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Los mejores libros son los que nos dicen lo que ya sabemos.”

— 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. “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

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

— George Orwell

455. “I will work harder!”

— George Orwell

456. “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

457. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

458. “And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered.”

— George Orwell

459. “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

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

— George Orwell

461. “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

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

— George Orwell

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

468. “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

469. “All animals are equal.”

— George Orwell

470. “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

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

— George Orwell

472. “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

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

— George Orwell

474. “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

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

— George Orwell

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

481. “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

482. “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

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

— George Orwell

484. “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

485. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

497. “He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.”

— George Orwell

498. “Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.”

— George Orwell

499. “And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.”

— George Orwell

500. “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.”

— George Orwell