Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”

— George Orwell

352. “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

— George Orwell

353. “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

— George Orwell

354. “Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what trees and what men.”

— George Orwell

355. “Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.”

— George Orwell

356. “Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken well and spread my tidings Of the golden future time.”

— George Orwell

357. “You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see.”

— George Orwell

358. “A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor – it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.”

— George Orwell

359. “And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered.”

— George Orwell

360. “We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

— George Orwell

361. “Four legs good, two legs bad.’ This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism.”

— George Orwell

362. “Writing a novel is agony.”

— George Orwell

363. “The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.”

— George Orwell

364. “The other animals understood how to vote, but could never think of any resolutions of their own.”

— George Orwell

365. “One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.”

— George Orwell

366. “Don’t let it happen, it’s up to you.”

— George Orwell

367. “I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?”

— George Orwell

368. “After 40, a man is responsible for his face.”

— George Orwell

369. “He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.”

— George Orwell

370. “Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?”

— George Orwell

371. “There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word – Man.”

— George Orwell

372. “A peace that is truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.”

— George Orwell

373. “The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.”

— George Orwell

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374. “The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.”

— George Orwell

375. “Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.”

— George Orwell

376. “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

— George Orwell

377. “When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.”

— George Orwell

378. “Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

— George Orwell

379. “Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.”

— George Orwell

380. “In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.”

— George Orwell

381. “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

— George Orwell

382. “When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist – after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.”

— George Orwell

383. “To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”

— George Orwell

384. “You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”

— George Orwell

385. “Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.”

— George Orwell

386. “It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”

— George Orwell

387. “What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.”

— George Orwell

388. “Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”

— George Orwell

389. “And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.”

— George Orwell

390. “By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

— George Orwell

391. “By preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.”

— George Orwell

392. “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.”

— George Orwell

393. “I have no wish to take life, not even human life.”

— George Orwell

394. “The belly comes before the soul.”

— George Orwell

395. “The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”

— George Orwell

396. “Inequality was the price of civilization.”

— George Orwell

397. “I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals. It would help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!”

— George Orwell

398. “What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

— George Orwell

399. “He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.”

— George Orwell

400. “The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.”

— George Orwell