Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”

— George Orwell

152. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

168. “Weakness is strength.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

170. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

173. “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

174. “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

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

— George Orwell

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

183. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

186. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

— George Orwell

187. “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

189. “Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.”

— George Orwell

190. “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”

— George Orwell

191. “Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

— George Orwell

192. “Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.”

— George Orwell

193. “Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.”

— George Orwell

194. “Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.”

— George Orwell

195. “Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.”

— George Orwell

196. “It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”

— George Orwell

197. “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

198. “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

200. “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.”

— George Orwell