Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

— George Orwell

402. “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

403. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

413. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

422. “I suppose we may as well say goodbye.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

424. “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

425. “The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.”

— George Orwell

426. “Se le persone non sanno scrivere bene allora non sanno pensare bene e se non sanno pensare bene altri penseranno per loro.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

428. “There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.”

— George Orwell

429. “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

430. “Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

432. “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

433. “It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.”

— George Orwell

434. “I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.”

— George Orwell

435. “These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists.”

— George Orwell

436. “No one is patriotic about taxes.”

— George Orwell

437. “Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.”

— George Orwell

438. “Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.”

— George Orwell

439. “An earthquake is such fun when it is over.”

— George Orwell

Featured in: Fun Quotes

440. “Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse – hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.”

— George Orwell

441. “It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.”

— George Orwell

442. “Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.”

— George Orwell

443. “It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.”

— George Orwell

444. “I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting.”

— George Orwell

445. “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.”

— George Orwell

446. “The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

— George Orwell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

447. “Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.”

— George Orwell

448. “An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.”

— George Orwell

449. “We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. 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

450. “I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”

— George Orwell