Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— George Orwell

356. “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

357. “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

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

— George Orwell

359. “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

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

— George Orwell

361. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

364. “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

365. “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

366. “The belly comes before the soul.”

— George Orwell

367. “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

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

— George Orwell

369. “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

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

— George Orwell

371. “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

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

— George Orwell

373. “Who cares?′ she said impatiently, ’it’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”

— George Orwell

374. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

378. “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

379. “Inequality was the price of civilization.”

— George Orwell

380. “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

381. “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

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

— George Orwell

383. “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

384. “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

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

— George Orwell

386. “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

387. “Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”

— George Orwell

388. “It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.”

— George Orwell

389. “Where there is equality there can be sanity.”

— George Orwell

390. “Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.”

— George Orwell

391. “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.”

— George Orwell

392. “No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.”

— George Orwell

393. “In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.”

— George Orwell

394. “It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature, Frederick and Pilkington said.”

— George Orwell

395. “One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.”

— George Orwell

396. “Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.”

— George Orwell

397. “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

398. “All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.”

— George Orwell

399. “The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.”

— George Orwell

400. “Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”

— George Orwell