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

352. “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

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

— George Orwell

354. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

357. “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

358. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

361. “The belly comes before the soul.”

— George Orwell

362. “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

363. “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

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

— George Orwell

365. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

368. “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

369. “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

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

— George Orwell

371. “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

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

— George Orwell

373. “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

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

— George Orwell

375. “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

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

— George Orwell

377. “Inequality was the price of civilization.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

380. “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

381. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

387. “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

388. “No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

390. “It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”

— George Orwell

391. “There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

— George Orwell

392. “It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

— George Orwell

393. “Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”

— George Orwell

394. “One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.”

— George Orwell

395. “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

— George Orwell

396. “There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.”

— George Orwell

397. “Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

399. “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”

— George Orwell

400. “If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.”

— George Orwell