Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

— George Orwell

202. “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

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

— George Orwell

204. “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

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

— George Orwell

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— George Orwell

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

217. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

220. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

228. “All human relationships must be purchased with money.”

— George Orwell

229. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

237. “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

239. “A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything.”

— George Orwell

240. “In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body.”

— George Orwell

241. “You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.”

— George Orwell

242. “But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed.”

— George Orwell

243. “No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.”

— George Orwell

244. “It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”

— George Orwell

245. “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

246. “In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.”

— George Orwell

247. “The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.”

— George Orwell

248. “One’s got to change the system, or one changes nothing.”

— George Orwell

249. “Reality is inside the skull.”

— George Orwell

250. “Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

— George Orwell