The full name of George Orwell is Eric Arthur Blair. His Pen name is George Orwell. He was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. Here we have shared George Orwell quotes on freedom, truth, power, communism, history, politics, inspirational, and motivational.
George Orwell was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, India, and died on January 21, 1950, University College Hospital, London, United Kingdom. His father’s name is Richard Walmesley Blair and his mother’s name is Ida Mabel Blair. His wife’s name is Eileen O’Shaughnessy (m. 1936; died 1945), Sonia Brownell (m. 1949).
George Orwell quotes
The best books… are those that tell you what you know already. – George Orwell
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. – 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
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. – George Orwell
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. – George Orwell
Each 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
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. – George Orwell
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. – George Orwell
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plow, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. – George Orwell
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
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 schizophrenia. – 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 squirting out ink. – George Orwell
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. – George Orwell
Frederick Douglass Quotes On Life
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. – George Orwell
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. – George Orwell
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself. – George Orwell
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. – George Orwell
Good writing is like a windowpane. – George Orwell
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy? – George Orwell
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents. – George Orwell
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. – George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. – George Orwell
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever. – George Orwell
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. – George Orwell
All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies, and hatred come invariably from people who are not fighting. – George Orwell
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. – 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
Those who ‘abjure’ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf. – 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 a dictatorship. – George Orwell
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. – George Orwell
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. – George Orwell
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. – George Orwell
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him. – George Orwell
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them. – George Orwell
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell. – George Orwell
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
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to anyone meaning. – George Orwell
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. – George Orwell
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. – George Orwell
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. – George Orwell
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him. – George Orwell
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing. – George Orwell
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil. – George Orwell
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. – George Orwell
I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man. – George Orwell
Early in life, I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. – George Orwell
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
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. – George Orwell
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. – George Orwell
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. – George Orwell
Serious sport is war minus the shooting. – George Orwell
War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent. – George Orwell
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. – George Orwell
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going around the sun. – George Orwell
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility. – George Orwell
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. – George Orwell
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt many temptations to be human beings. – George Orwell
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment. – George Orwell
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. – George Orwell
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism. – George Orwell
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all, it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. – George Orwell
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. – George Orwell
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun. – George Orwell
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
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt. – George Orwell
A war against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. – George Orwell
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? – George Orwell
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. – George Orwell
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization. – George Orwell
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. – George Orwell
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. – George Orwell
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. – George Orwell
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy. – George Orwell
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant. – George Orwell
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. – George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. – George Orwell
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
Four legs are good, two legs bad. – 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
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. – George Orwell
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. – George Orwell
For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity. – George Orwell
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. – George Orwell
Big Brother is watching you. – George Orwell
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for a reaction. – George Orwell
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating, and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever. – George Orwell
Liberal: a power worshipper without power. – George Orwell
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. – George Orwell
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose. – George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. – George Orwell
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