Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “All human relationships must be purchased with money.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

203. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

207. “We have sunk so low it has become the obligation of every decent, thinking individual to re-state the obvious!”

— George Orwell

208. “They fear love because it creates a world they can’t control.”

— George Orwell

209. “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

210. “Napoleon is always right.”

— George Orwell

211. “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

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

— George Orwell

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

— George Orwell

228. “Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

230. “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

231. “La guerra es paz, la libertad es esclavitud, la ignorancia es la fuerza.”

— George Orwell

232. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

236. “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

237. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

240. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

246. “All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

248. “Surely, comrades, you don’t want Jones back?”

— George Orwell

249. “When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

— George Orwell

250. “There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”

— George Orwell