Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”

— George Orwell

154. “The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

— George Orwell

155. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

158. “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

159. “And I believe that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph again.”

— George Orwell

160. “War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”

— George Orwell

161. “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

— George Orwell

162. “After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.”

— George Orwell

163. “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”

— George Orwell

164. “All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.”

— George Orwell

165. “Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.”

— George Orwell

166. “Power is not a means; it is an end.”

— George Orwell

167. “To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.”

— George Orwell

168. “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.”

— George Orwell

169. “It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”

— George Orwell

170. “Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.”

— George Orwell

171. “What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

— George Orwell

172. “Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

— George Orwell

173. “The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.”

— George Orwell

174. “The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

— George Orwell

175. “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.”

— George Orwell

176. “Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.”

— George Orwell

177. “Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.”

— George Orwell

178. “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

— George Orwell

179. “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”

— George Orwell

180. “Weakness is strength.”

— George Orwell

181. “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

— George Orwell

182. “Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.”

— George Orwell

183. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

— George Orwell

184. “When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

— George Orwell

185. “The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.”

— George Orwell

186. “It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.”

— George Orwell

187. “Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.”

— George Orwell

188. “Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.”

— George Orwell

189. “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.”

— George Orwell

190. “If human equality is to be forever averted – if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently – then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”

— George Orwell

191. “To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”

— George Orwell

192. “For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.”

— George Orwell

193. “Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”

— George Orwell

194. “If one harbors anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.”

— George Orwell

195. “Manchester is the belly and guts of the nation.”

— George Orwell

196. “Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on – that is, badly.”

— George Orwell

197. “The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”

— George Orwell

198. “Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.”

— George Orwell

199. “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

— George Orwell

200. “A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.”

— George Orwell