Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— George Orwell

203. “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

204. “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

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

— George Orwell

206. “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

207. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

210. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

221. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

226. “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

227. “Napoleon is always right.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

230. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

243. “Reality is inside the skull.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

245. “Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

— George Orwell

246. “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

247. “Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”

— George Orwell

248. “The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell