Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right.”

— George Orwell

353. “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

354. “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

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

— George Orwell

356. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”

— George Orwell

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— George Orwell

375. “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

376. “The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— George Orwell

382. “The belly comes before the soul.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

384. “If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”

— George Orwell

385. “Inequality was the price of civilization.”

— George Orwell

386. “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

387. “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

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

— George Orwell

389. “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

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

— George Orwell

391. “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

— George Orwell

392. “In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it”? Money has become the grand test of virtue.”

— George Orwell

393. “Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.”

— George Orwell

394. “What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.”

— George Orwell

395. “Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness.”

— George Orwell

396. “But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.”

— George Orwell

397. “England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.”

— George Orwell

398. “The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.”

— George Orwell

399. “When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.”

— George Orwell

400. “You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.”

— George Orwell