Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

257. “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

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

— George Orwell

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

266. “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

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

— George Orwell

268. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

271. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

276. “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

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

— George Orwell

278. “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

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

— George Orwell

280. “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

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

— George Orwell

282. “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

283. “All art is propaganda.”

— George Orwell

284. “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

285. “The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

287. “The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.”

— George Orwell

288. “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

289. “The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.”

— George Orwell

290. “They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”

— George Orwell

291. “Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state – however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.”

— George Orwell

292. “Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

294. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.”

— George Orwell

295. “Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.”

— George Orwell

296. “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

— George Orwell

297. “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

298. “The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.”

— George Orwell

299. “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

— George Orwell

300. “The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.”

— George Orwell