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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 can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying

World

“Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.”

George Orwell

Attributed to Orwell in State of Fear (2004) by Michael Crichton, and Picking Fights with Thunderstorms (2005) by Sheila Suess Kennedy
Disputed

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

No source for this quote among Orwell's writings has yet been located, and the earliest published source of this phrase found on Google Books is this snippet https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=kWD0AAAAMAAJ&q=%22truth+is+a+revolutionary+act%22&dq=%22truth+is+a+revolutionary+act%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjs0MKSqpbKAhWH0iYKHXj6ABUQ6AEIJjAD from p. 5 of Science Dimension, Volumes 14–18 (1982) published by the National Research Council Canada. Quote Investigator has an article "In a Time of Universal Deceit – Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/24/truth-revolutionary/ indicating their attempts to trace the quote. The earliest similar remarks they had found were in a 1982 book titled “Partners in Ecocide: Australia’s Complicity in the Uranium Cartel” by Venturino Giorgio Venturini, where the word “universal” was omitted, and a specific originating text was not identified: "In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
Variants:
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies. (Often attributed by Ron Paul to Orwell but never sourced.)
In the mid-19th century Karl Georg von Raumer made a remark, which has a similar meaning. In Geschichte der Pedagogic (1855), he states: 'Jede keimende Wahrheit ist revolutionär gegen den entgegenstehenden herrschenden Irrthum, jede keimende Tugend revolutionär gegen das im Schwange gehende, ihr widersprechende Laster' which translates as: "Every germinating truth is revolutionary against the opposing ruling error, every germinating virtue is revolutionary against popular contradictory lies."
In 1898 French socialist Jean Jaurès said, "When a society, when an institution, lives only by lies, truth is revolutionary." He was speaking with reference to the ongoing Dreyfus Affair. The statement is quoted in Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (2010), p. 262. (She cites Le petit Meridional, 3 July 1898, as the original source.) This seems very close in spirit and in phrasing to the pseudo-Orwell quotation. (The cumulative index to the many volumes of Orwell's writing compiled and edited by Peter Davison does not reveal any direct references to Jaurès or the Dreyfus Affair.)
Disputed
Variant: In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Truth , Universe , Time

“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

"Benefit Of Clergy: Some Notes On Salvador Dalí," Dickens, Dali & Others: Studies in Popular Culture (1944) http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/dali/english/e_dali

Life , Lying

“The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Evil , Past , Future

“The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Secret , Learning , Past

“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

Source: All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

Life , Lying

“To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Future , Drawing

“You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”

George Orwell

“In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Fight

“Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Pain

“Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.”

George Orwell

“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 book 1984

Source: 1984

Love , Tear , Victory

“Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“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 book 1984

Source: 1984

Learning , Time

“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 book 1984

Source: 1984

Life , Future , Parting , Dead

“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
Personality

“Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Dead

“Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Fear , Suicide

“At night all cats are grey.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Cats , Night

“How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Future

“And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Cry

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event,—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Death , Past

“Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.”

George Orwell

Source: Smothered Under Journalism: 1946

Tea , Country

“How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Communication , Future

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

George Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), Part I: England Your England http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/lionunicorn.html
"The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941)
Source: The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius
Context: As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.

Flying

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.”

George Orwell book Inside the Whale and Other Essays

Inside the Whale (1940) http://orwell.ru/library/essays/whale/english/e_itw
Source: Inside the Whale and Other Essays

People

“The more men you've had, the more I love you.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Love , Men

“Inequality was the price of civilization.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.”

George Orwell

Source: Diaries

People

“Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and Out in Paris and London

Money

“The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Truth

“If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.”

George Orwell Why I Write

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 1
Source: Why I Write
Context: Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be purchased with money. If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. And how right they are, after all! For, moneyless, you are unlovable. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. But then, if I haven't money, I DON'T speak with the tongues of men and of angels.

Love , Women , Men , Money

“For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Loneliness

“No sentimentality, comrade… The only good human being is a dead one.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Variant: The only good human being is a dead one.
Source: Animal Farm

Dead

“A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

George Orwell

“He loved Big Brother.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Love

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Death

“I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY”

George Orwell book 1984

1984
Variant: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

Understanding

“In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,…[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated. 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.”

George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (28 July 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

People , Art

“Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”

George Orwell

"You and the Atom Bomb" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb, Tribune (19 October 1945)

Strong