Top 500 George Orwell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

404. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

413. “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

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

— George Orwell

415. “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

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

— George Orwell

417. “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

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

— George Orwell

419. “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

420. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

426. “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”

— George Orwell

427. “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

428. “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

429. “No one is patriotic about taxes.”

— George Orwell

430. “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

431. “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

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

— George Orwell

433. “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

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

— George Orwell

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

441. “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

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

— George Orwell

443. “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

444. “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

445. “Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

448. “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

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

— George Orwell

450. “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