Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”

— George Orwell

102. “If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.”

— George Orwell

103. “I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”

— George Orwell

104. “Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

— George Orwell

105. “We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

— George Orwell

106. “Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.”

— George Orwell

107. “The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

— George Orwell

108. “Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.”

— George Orwell

109. “Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”

— George Orwell

110. “The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.”

— George Orwell

111. “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

— George Orwell

112. “In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.”

— George Orwell

113. “A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.”

— George Orwell

114. “For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

— George Orwell

115. “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.”

— George Orwell

116. “Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.”

— George Orwell

117. “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”

— George Orwell

118. “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”

— George Orwell

119. “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.”

— George Orwell

120. “From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.”

— George Orwell

121. “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

— George Orwell

122. “The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.”

— George Orwell

123. “A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into.”

— George Orwell

124. “He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell

125. “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

— George Orwell

126. “Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution.”

— George Orwell

127. “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

— George Orwell

128. “The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

— George Orwell

129. “International football is the continuation of war by other means.”

— George Orwell

130. “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”

— George Orwell

131. “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”

— George Orwell

132. “Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

— George Orwell

133. “To die hating them, that was freedom.”

— George Orwell

134. “He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms – one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.”

— George Orwell

135. “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

— George Orwell

136. “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.”

— George Orwell

137. “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.”

— George Orwell

138. “Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O’Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O’Brien: You do not exist.”

— George Orwell

139. “There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.”

— George Orwell

140. “War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.”

— George Orwell

141. “No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE.”

— George Orwell

142. “We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.”

— George Orwell

143. “Gambling, beer and football filled the horizons of their minds.”

— George Orwell

144. “All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”

— George Orwell

145. “Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats.”

— George Orwell

146. “Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

— George Orwell

147. “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.”

— George Orwell

148. “Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.”

— George Orwell

149. “As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”

— George Orwell

150. “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.”

— George Orwell