Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

— George Orwell

202. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

209. “If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

211. “Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally.”

— George Orwell

212. “A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

— George Orwell

213. “Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

215. “Napoleon is always right.”

— George Orwell

216. “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

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

— George Orwell

218. “But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”

— George Orwell

219. “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

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

— George Orwell

221. “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

222. “A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

224. “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.”

— George Orwell

225. “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

226. “The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.”

— George Orwell

227. “How right the working classes are in their “materialism.” How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!”

— George Orwell

228. “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

229. “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

230. “One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

— George Orwell

231. “Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.”

— George Orwell

232. “In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.”

— George Orwell

233. “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.”

— George Orwell

234. “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”

— George Orwell

235. “Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

— George Orwell

236. “If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.”

— George Orwell

237. “We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.”

— George Orwell

238. “To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.”

— George Orwell

239. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.”

— George Orwell

240. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”

— George Orwell

241. “The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.”

— George Orwell

242. “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.”

— George Orwell

243. “If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.”

— George Orwell

244. “Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.”

— George Orwell

245. “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

246. “The more intelligent, the less sane.”

— George Orwell

247. “His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” – which he had adopted as his personal motto.”

— George Orwell

248. “We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.”

— George Orwell

249. “He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.”

— George Orwell

250. “Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job.”

— George Orwell