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George Orwell Quotes
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473 Quotes on Love, Truth, Control, Language, and Challenging Societal Norms

Immerse yourself in the profound wisdom of George Orwell, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. From love and control to truth and language, explore his timeless quotes that challenge societal norms and delve into the complexities of human nature.

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was an English writer known for his powerful and insightful works that critiqued social and political systems. He used lucid prose and allegory to convey his opposition to totalitarianism and support for democratic socialism. Orwell was a versatile writer, producing literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His most famous works include the allegorical novella Animal Farm and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Additionally, his non-fiction works such as The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia are highly esteemed for their documentation of working-class life and experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

Born in India but raised and educated in England, Orwell had a varied career before establishing himself as a writer. He served as an Imperial policeman in Burma before returning to England where he began writing under the name George Orwell. Throughout his life, he worked various jobs including teaching and bookselling while also contributing occasional pieces of journalism. By the late 1920s, his writing gained recognition with the publication of his first books. Injured during the Spanish Civil War, he struggled with ill health upon returning to England. During World War II, Orwell worked as a journalist and later at the BBC from 1941 to 1943. Animal Farm's release in 1945 brought him widespread fame shortly before his death. As one of Britain's greatest writers since 1945, George Orwell continues to have a significant impact on popular culture and language through terms such as "Orwellian" which describes oppressive social practices found in his works like "Big Brother," "Thought Police," and "Newspeak."

✵ 25. June 1903 – 21. January 1950
George Orwell photo
George Orwell: 473   quotes 1079   likes

George Orwell Quotes

“You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

World

“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Past , Future

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Truth , Way

“It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Tree

“To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.”

George Orwell book 1984

Attributed to Orwell by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC (27 September 2006), this seems to be a paraphrase of some of the statements in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Misattributed
Source: 1984

Truth , Past

“Does Big Brother exist?"
"Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party."
"Does he exist in the same way as I exist?"
"You do not exist.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Way

“Surely, comrades, you don't want Jones back?”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“… the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

War

“What happens to you here is forever.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

For Her

“Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 4
Source: Down and Out in Paris and London
Context: For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

Money

“He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 30
Source: Down and Out in Paris and London
Context: He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.

God , Pleasure , Thinking , Personality

“Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

World

“History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

History

“She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Beauty

“A lunatic is just a minority of one.”

George Orwell book 1984

Variant: Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
Source: 1984

“You will see me, where there is no darkness.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“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 Why I Write

Source: Why I Write

Lie , Books , Art , Drawing

“they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

Dogs , Time

“This life we live nowadays! It's not life, it's stagnation, death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses, and the meaningless people inside them! Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 5

Life , Death , People , Thinking

“He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

God

“At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”

George Orwell Why I Write

"The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941)
Source: Why I Write
Context: Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.

Exercises , Time

“When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Source: Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Context: I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

Nature

“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
Question , Decision

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.”

George Orwell book 1984

Variant: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
Source: 1984

Imagination , Future

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Secret

“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

Problem

“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”

George Orwell Why I Write

"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: Why I Write
Context: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

“The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and Out in Paris and London

“Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Question , Thinking , Learning

“Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.”

George Orwell
Change

“Writing a novel is agony.”

George Orwell

“Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Charles Dickens (1939)
Source: Homage to Catalonia

Fight

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

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 9; a remark by Boris
Source: Down and Out in Paris and London

People

“He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Pain , Fear , Effort

“When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

George Orwell book Shooting an Elephant

Source: Shooting an Elephant

Freedom

“Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

George Orwell

"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)
Context: A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is "weak," "sinful" and anxious for a "good time." Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.

Life , People , Imagination , Suffering

“Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution”

George Orwell

Source: An Age Like This: 1920-1940

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

George Orwell

"Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)

Art

“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comforable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

War , Way , Intelligence , Sea