Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “If human equality is to be forever averted – if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently – then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

203. “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

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

— George Orwell

205. “For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.”

— George Orwell

206. “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

207. “Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”

— George Orwell

208. “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

Featured in: Loyalty Quotes

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

215. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— George Orwell

Featured in: Book Quotes

217. “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

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

— George Orwell

219. “Napoleon is always right.”

— George Orwell

220. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

223. “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

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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. “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

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. “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

234. “All art is propaganda.”

— George Orwell

235. “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

236. “Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

238. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

241. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

243. “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

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

— George Orwell

245. “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

246. “He said that the education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who are already grown up.”

— George Orwell

247. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

250. “Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better!” It went on for five minutes without stopping. And by the time the sheep had quieted down, the chance to utter any protest had passed, for the pigs had marched back into the farmhouse.”

— George Orwell