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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

“Poverty is spiritual halitosis.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

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

“It seemed queer, in the barber's shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited. "The Revolution has struck off our chains," the notice said. I felt like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back on again if they didn't look out.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

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

George Orwell

"The Art of Donald McGill" (1941)

“The most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard" — which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 32

“If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican, you often find yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally.”

George Orwell

As I Please (1943–1947)

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

George Orwell book Burmese Days

Source: Burmese Days (1934), Ch. XV

“Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”

George Orwell

Letter to H. J. Willmett (18 May 1944), published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945 (2000), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus https://books.google.com/books?id=fCRLPIbLP8IC&lpg=PA149&dq=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&pg=PA149#v=onepage&q=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&f=false

People , Secret , Feeling , History

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”

George Orwell book Coming Up for Air

Coming Up for Air, Part I, Ch. 4 (1939)

Books , History , Thinking , Reality

“Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 3

Money , God , World , Swine

“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 book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 7

Hunger , Water

“Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them … it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine.”

George Orwell book Burmese Days

John Flory, Ch. III
Burmese Days (1934)

Lie , Way , Imagination , Time

“Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. 'Don't talk to me about the lower classes,' she used to say. 'I hate them. They smell.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

And Ravelston adored her.
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 5

Hate , Reading

“Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.”

George Orwell

"What is Science?" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien, Tribune (26 October 1945)

Education , History , Literature , Knowledge

“Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.[http://alexpeak.com/twr/oateotc/]</sup”

George Orwell

As I Please (1943–1947)

“Paddy and I had scarcely a wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some nervous trouble, shell-shock perhaps, which made him cry out 'Pip!' at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise, something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of sleep…. he must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. He was an example of the kind of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep when men are herded as they are in these lodging houses.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 29

Men , People , Sleep , Housing

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

George Orwell

"Such, Such Were The Joys" http://orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys (May 1947); published in Partisan Review (September/October 1952)

Truth

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

George Orwell

"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," Tribune (12 April 1946, page 10, last paragraph http://archive.tribunemagazine.co.uk/page/12th-april-1946/10)

Sun

“The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system.”

George Orwell

"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Charles Dickens (1939)

Truth , Books , Education , Law

“Everyone always did miss everyone else in this war, whenever it was humanly possible to do so.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

War

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

War , Fight

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

George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (28 January 1944)<sup> http://www.telelib.com/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440128.html</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

Personality

“One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.”

George Orwell

Review of The Freedom of the Streets by Jack Common, June 1938, pp. 335-6

Men

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle … There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Way , Understanding , Time , Fight

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (4 February 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/hiwbtw/</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

Truth , Past , Future

“The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.”

George Orwell

As I Please (25 February 1944) http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/eaip_01
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

Life , Hate , Religion , Law

“Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our buglers were amateurs--I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to them outside the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the barrack yard, the long morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of football, fifty a side, in the gravelled riding--school.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

School , Game , Learning , Football

“In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.”

George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (12 May 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/</sup>
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

War , World , Travel , Question

“It's not a matter of whether the war is not real, or if it is, Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact.”

George Orwell

Michael Moore declares these lines in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 as something "Orwell once wrote". They are nearly identical to a block of voiceover in the 1984 Richard Burton/John Hurt movie version of 1984 when Winston (Hurt) is silently reading Goldstein's book. All of the lines are excerpts from various parts of Goldstein's book in part 2, chapter 9 of the novel with some paraphrasing. Note that the fourth sentence begins with "This new version". In Moore's speech there is no antecedent for this phrase; consequently, the sentence makes no sense there. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SVrM2Ef81C7EUSTm4zsgjQk9mgMSeFUnlEvtleR2V1w/edit?usp=sharing http://metabunk.org/threads/debunked-war-is-not-meant-to-be-won-it-is-meant-to-be-continuous.1259/
Misattributed

War , Effort , Past , Victory

“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

George Orwell book Inside the Whale and Other Essays

"Charles Dickens" (1939), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940) http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english/e_chd
Charles Dickens (1939)

Men

“It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.”

George Orwell

Reflections on Gandhi (1949)

Night , Country

“One of the big failures in human history has been the agelong attempt to stop women painting their faces.”

George Orwell

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

Women , History , Failure , Painting

“It is not a good symptom that hanging should still be the accepted form of capital punishment in this country. Hanging is a barbarous, inefficient way of killing anybody, and at least one fact about it—quite widely known, I believe—is so obscene as to be almost unprintable.”

George Orwell

"As I Please" column in The Tribune (15 November 1946)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/</sup>
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

Way , Country

“Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.”

George Orwell

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Hunger

“How sweet the air does smell — even the air of a back-street in the suburbs — after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike!”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 27, on the morning after Orwell is let out of his first tramps' accommodation, or 'spike'.

“Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.”

George Orwell

"London Letter" in Partisan Review (Winter 1945)

World

“People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty to some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.”

George Orwell

"How the Poor Die" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/Poor_Die/english/e_pdie, Now (November 1946)

Death , Pain , War , People

“We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

George Orwell

Letter to The Tribune (20 December 1940), later published in A Patriot After All, 1940-1941 (1999)

History

“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”

George Orwell

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Change

“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

"Revenge is Sour" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/revenge/english/e_revso, Tribune (9 November 1945)

Dreams , Idea , Revenge , Sense

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (7 July 1944)
As I Please (1943–1947)

Dogs , Training

“From Carlyle onwards, but especially in the last generation, the British intelligentsia have tended to take their ideas from Europe and have been infected by habits of thought that derive ultimately from Machiavelli. All the cults that have been fashionable in the last dozen years, Communism, Fascism, and pacifism, are in the last analysis forms of power worship.”

George Orwell

"The English People" (written Spring 1944, published 1947)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/</sup>

Communication , Idea , Fashion

“I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Memory , Evil

“Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country, and even less, I should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must have their "atrocities" from one source or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-down of war criminals and quislings.”

George Orwell

"Revenge is Sour", Tribune (9 November 1945)

War , Country

“The Daily Worker disapproves of dictatorship in Athens, the Catholic Herald disapproves of dictatorship in Belgrade. There is no one who is able to say—at least, no one who has the chance to say in a newspaper of big circulation—that this whole dirty game of spheres of influence, quislings, purges, deportation, one-party elections and hundred per cent plebiscites is morally the same whether it is done by ourselves, the Russians or the Nazis. Even in the case of such frank returns to barbarism as the use of hostages, disapproval is only felt when it happens to be the enemy and not ourselves who is doing it.”

George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (26 January 1945)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/</sup>
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

Game , Chance

“I note that once again there is serious talk of trying to attract tourists to this country after the war… [b]ut it is quite safe to prophesy that the attempt will be a failure. Apart from the many other difficulties, our licensing laws and the artificial price of drink are quite enough to keep foreigners away…. But even these prices are less dismaying to foreigners than the lunatic laws which permit you to buy a glass of beer at half past ten while forbidding you to buy it at twenty-five past, and which have done their best to turn the pubs into mere boozing shops by excluding children from them.
How downtrodden we are in comparison with most other peoples is shown by the fact that even people who are far from being ""temperance"" don't seriously imagine that our licensing laws could be altered. Whenever I suggest that pubs might be allowed to open in the afternoon, or to stay open till midnight, I always get the same answer: ""The first people to object would be the publicans. They don't want to have to stay open twelve hours a day."" People assume, you see, that opening hours, whether long or short, must be regulated by the law, even for one-man businesses. In France, and in various other countries, a café proprietor opens or shuts just as it suits him. He can keep open the whole twenty-four hours if he wants to; and, on the other hand, if he feels like shutting his cafe and going away for a week, he can do that too. In England we have had no such liberty for about a hundred years, and people are hardly able to imagine it.”

George Orwell

As I Please column in The Tribune (18 August 1944), http://alexpeak.com/twr/dwall/
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

War , Children , People , Law

“Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have?”

George Orwell book Burmese Days

Ch XX
Burmese Days (1934)

World

“[T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?”

George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (14 July 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/</sup>
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

Women

“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 book Burmese Days

Source: Burmese Days (1934), Ch. XX

Pain , Suffering , Envy

“There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.”

George Orwell

"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)

People , Nature , Thinking , Appearance