Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

258. “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

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

— George Orwell

260. “Animal Farm is a warning to every reader. Beware the utopia; beware the perfect solution and the easy slogan; beware those who claim to know what is best for you; beware bombast and dogma; beware the death of doubt; beware those who do not practice what they preach. Beware the chosen. Beware the one and only true path.”

— George Orwell

261. “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

262. “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

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

— George Orwell

264. “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

265. “The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”

— George Orwell

266. “Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

— George Orwell

267. “Reality is inside the skull.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

269. “We make you pay for the water you drink, for the food you eat, for the wars we need, for the crimes we commit. We make you dedicate the most important part of your life to us, but we give you wages and tell you they allow you to buy stuff and pay for your needs to make us richer. We call this freedom.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

271. “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

272. “All nationalistic distinctions – all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect – are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.”

— George Orwell

273. “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

274. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

277. “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

278. “It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

280. “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

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

— George Orwell

282. “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

283. “Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.”

— George Orwell

284. “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

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

— George Orwell

286. “We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

288. “Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”

— George Orwell

289. “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

290. “There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree.”

— George Orwell

291. “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

292. “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

293. “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

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

— George Orwell

299. “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

300. “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