The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. - George Orwell
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. - George Orwell
No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is a thing that human beings must avoid. - George Orwell
Words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. - George Orwell
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. - George Orwell
..nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been short lived where as adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. - George Orwell
There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways. - George Orwell
....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time - George Orwell
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. - George Orwell
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 torture is torture. The object of power is power. - George Orwell
War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength - George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. - George Orwell
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
By lack of understanding they remained insane. - George Orwell
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. - George Orwell
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane. - George Orwell
[Tolstoy] does not necessarily get rid of [his angry] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms. - George Orwell
People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. - George Orwell
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. - George Orwell
Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - George Orwell
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. - George Orwell
Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four. If granted, all else follows. - George Orwell
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure. - George Orwell
From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books. - George Orwell
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. - George Orwell
Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. - George Orwell
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. - George Orwell
The future is a boot smashing a human face forever. - George Orwell
Nimic nu există în altă parte decât în conștiința omului. - George Orwell
All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal. - George Orwell
Ništa nije tvoje vlastito osim nekoliko kubičnih centimetara u tvojoj lubanji. - George Orwell
Writing a novel is agony. - George Orwell
And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive. - George Orwell
…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings. - George Orwell
Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - George Orwell
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell
Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. - George Orwell
...война, как известно, всегда привлекает всякую шваль... - George Orwell
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness," O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in. - George Orwell
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. - George Orwell
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."[Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945] - George Orwell
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - George Orwell
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time. - George Orwell
He who controls the past controls the future. - George Orwell
Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope - George Orwell
The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also. - George Orwell
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
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. - George Orwell
The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. - George Orwell
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. - George Orwell
I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you. - George Orwell
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. - George Orwell
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. - George Orwell
What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. - George Orwell
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. - George Orwell
I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. - George Orwell
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. - George Orwell
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. - George Orwell
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. - George Orwell
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. - George Orwell
We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. - George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. - George Orwell
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity. - George Orwell
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
They can make you say anything - ANYTHING - but they can't make you believe it. - George Orwell
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. - George Orwell
in our age there is no such thing as " keeping out of politics " all issues are political issues , and politics itself is a mass of lies , evasions , folly , hatred and . - George Orwell
What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists. - George Orwell
Liberal: a power worshipper without power. - George Orwell
War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. - George Orwell
When man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys. - George Orwell
[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. - George Orwell
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. - George Orwell
You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can believe that the subject race is biologically different. - George Orwell
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
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. - George Orwell
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane. - George Orwell
Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage have developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped. - George Orwell
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. - George Orwell
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them. - George Orwell
Good novel are written by people who are not frightened. - George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. - George Orwell
At age 50, every man has the face he deserves. - George Orwell
Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. - George Orwell
Big Brother is watching you. - George Orwell
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned. - George Orwell
...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. - George Orwell
Sanity is not statistical. - George Orwell
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. - George Orwell
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. - George Orwell
If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. - George Orwell
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - George Orwell
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. - George Orwell
The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. - George Orwell
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. - George Orwell
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves. - George Orwell
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings. - George Orwell
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. - George Orwell
All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them. - George Orwell