Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

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

— George Orwell

203. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

— George Orwell

204. “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

205. “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

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

— George Orwell

207. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

210. “They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

218. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

222. “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

223. “Napoleon is always right.”

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

228. “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

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

— George Orwell

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— George Orwell

234. “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

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

— George Orwell

236. “Reality is inside the skull.”

— George Orwell

237. “Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

241. “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

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

— George Orwell

243. “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

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

— George Orwell

245. “Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.”

— George Orwell

246. “No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

248. “Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

— George Orwell

249. “After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.”

— George Orwell

250. “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