Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

404. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

407. “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

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

— George Orwell

409. “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

410. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

417. “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”

— George Orwell

418. “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

419. “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

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

— George Orwell

421. “No one is patriotic about taxes.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

423. “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

424. “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

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

— George Orwell

426. “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

427. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

— George Orwell

434. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

437. “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

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

— George Orwell

439. “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

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

— George Orwell

441. “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

442. “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

443. “You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see.”

— George Orwell

444. “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

445. “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

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

— George Orwell

447. “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

448. “Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

450. “There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.”

— George Orwell