Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.”

— George Orwell

402. “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

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

— George Orwell

404. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

408. “No one is patriotic about taxes.”

— George Orwell

409. “The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.”

— George Orwell

410. “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

411. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

414. “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

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

— George Orwell

416. “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

417. “Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

— George Orwell

418. “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

419. “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

420. “Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.”

— George Orwell

421. “Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.”

— George Orwell

422. “People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? ‘Natural’ death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.”

— George Orwell

423. “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

425. “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”

— George Orwell

426. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In.”

— George Orwell

427. “There will be no art, no literature, no science.”

— George Orwell

428. “Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.”

— George Orwell

429. “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

430. “If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.”

— George Orwell

431. “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

— George Orwell

432. “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”

— George Orwell

433. “Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”

— George Orwell

434. “The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged.”

— George Orwell

435. “Los mejores libros son los que nos dicen lo que ya sabemos.”

— George Orwell

436. “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

437. “Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”

— George Orwell

438. “The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.”

— George Orwell

439. “He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell

440. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

441. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”

— George Orwell

442. “Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or fountain pen.”

— George Orwell

443. “Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. Now.”

— George Orwell

444. “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

445. “Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.”

— George Orwell

446. “All animals are equal.”

— George Orwell

447. “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.”

— George Orwell

448. “Boxer was an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as any two ordinary horses put together.”

— George Orwell

449. “A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.”

— George Orwell

450. “We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.”

— George Orwell