Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

— George Orwell

102. “I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”

— George Orwell

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

109. “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

110. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

113. “A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.”

— George Orwell

114. “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

131. “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

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

— George Orwell

133. “Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

135. “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

— George Orwell

136. “These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

138. “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

139. “They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

141. “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

142. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”

— George Orwell

143. “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

144. “In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.”

— George Orwell

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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

150. “A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today.”

— George Orwell