Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.”

— George Orwell

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

457. “Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”

— George Orwell

458. “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”

— George Orwell

459. “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

460. “You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”

— George Orwell

461. “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

462. “I have no wish to take life, not even human life.”

— George Orwell

463. “We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty.”

— George Orwell

464. “There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree.”

— George Orwell

465. “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

466. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

469. “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

470. “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

471. “Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, ‘mass sadism’, the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.”

— George Orwell

472. “This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”

— George Orwell

473. “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

474. “That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

— George Orwell

475. “The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.”

— George Orwell

476. “Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere.”

— George Orwell

477. “Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.”

— George Orwell

478. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.”

— George Orwell

479. “Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.”

— George Orwell

480. “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.”

— George Orwell

481. “Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.”

— George Orwell

482. “The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.”

— George Orwell

483. “In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolise the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.”

— George Orwell

484. “The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.”

— George Orwell

485. “A bird’s wing, comrades,” he said, “is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg.”

— George Orwell

486. “It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.”

— George Orwell

487. “Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph.”

— George Orwell

488. “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

489. “The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.”

— George Orwell

490. “Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.”

— George Orwell

491. “The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.”

— George Orwell

492. “Why was it that they could never shout like that about something that mattered?”

— George Orwell

493. “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,? he told her.”

— George Orwell

494. “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.”

— George Orwell

495. “The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.”

— George Orwell

496. “Throughout the spring and summer they worked a sixty-hour week, and in August Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons as well. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”

— George Orwell

497. “The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.”

— George Orwell

498. “If you have your lower animals to contend with,’ he said, ’we have our lower classes!”

— George Orwell

499. “I suppose we may as well say goodbye.”

— George Orwell

500. “The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets-anything that might throw light upon the past had been systemically altered.”

— George Orwell