Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— George Orwell

253. “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

254. “Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course – but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.”

— George Orwell

255. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

258. “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

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

— George Orwell

260. “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

261. “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

— George Orwell

262. “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

263. “What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

266. “Perhaps “friend” was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades; but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

269. “Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.”

— George Orwell

270. “The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.” – George Orwell, 1984.”

— George Orwell

271. “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

— George Orwell

272. “By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.”

— George Orwell

273. “Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”

— George Orwell

274. “The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

277. “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

— George Orwell

278. “How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.”

— George Orwell

279. “The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.”

— George Orwell

280. “The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.”

— George Orwell

281. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

— George Orwell

282. “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

— George Orwell

283. “The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

— George Orwell

284. “He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

286. “The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense, it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.”

— George Orwell

287. “The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.”

— George Orwell

288. “Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.”

— George Orwell

289. “The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.”

— George Orwell

290. “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.”

— George Orwell

291. “The end was contained in the beginning.”

— George Orwell

292. “And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.”

— George Orwell

293. “Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.”

— George Orwell

294. “The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.”

— George Orwell

295. “We may be together for another six months – a year – there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?”

— George Orwell

296. “Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.”

— George Orwell

297. “The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.”

— George Orwell

298. “At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.”

— George Orwell

299. “All art is propaganda.”

— George Orwell

300. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.”

— George Orwell