The page includes the very best George Orwell quotes, categorised by topic.
‘George Orwell’ is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903 – 1950), a widely quoted English novelist, journalist, and essayist. Apart from the sharp observations and clear prose of his essays and journalistic articles, his novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are among the most influential novels of the 20th century.
Some writers have such distinctive styles or ways of depicting the world that those characteristics have earned them recognition in words like ‘Shakespearean,’ ‘Dickensian,’ and ‘Chaucerian.’ Orwell has joined that group with some of his quotes: such terms as ‘alternative facts’ are clearly Orwellian. Some of the words he coined, like ‘doublespeak’ – contradictory statements, and ‘thoughtcrime,’ have now become part of the English language. His name for the face of the oppressive state of Oceana’s surveillance of the population, ‘Big Brother,’ is now a very familiar term in modern Western culture, and ‘Room 101,’ a torture chamber in Nineteen Eighty-four, commonly now refers to any place you don’t want to go to. The word ‘unfriend’ used by Facebook to dismiss or delete someone is distinctly Orwellian in that the language of his fictional state, ‘Newspeak,’ uses the prefix ‘un’ to create an opposite. In Facebook, it is used as a verb, but it implies ‘enemy,’ the opposite of ‘friend.’ That kind of language is very much due to the influence of George Orwell. Quotes from his various works reflect that.
With this in mind, here is our selection of the most memorable and significant George Orwell quotes:
George Orwell Quotes on Freedom
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
“Freedom of speech is real.”
“He is a slave with a semblance of liberty which is worse than the most cruel slavery.”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“In every one of those little stucco boxes, there’s some poor bastard who’s never free except when he’s fast asleep and dreaming”
“Looking at the whole world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.”
“No one can get up much enthusiasm for a Government which puts you in jail if you open your mouth”
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
“The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.”
“The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”
“There was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.”
“What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”
“Will the man in the street ever feel that freedom of the mind is as important and as much in need of being defended as his daily bread?”
“You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.”
“You just got to say to yourself, “I”m a free man in here” – he tapped his forehead – “and you”re all right”.”
George Orwell Quotes on Power & Politics
“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”
“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”
“By preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except the steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
“It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.”
“Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“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 most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
“The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
“There is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.”
“Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect, and unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell Quotes on Society
“A world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.”
“Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a ‘good’ man is squeezing the trigger… have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.”
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion.”
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”
“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing”
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
“People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“The distinguishing mark of a man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
“The existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.”
“The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.”
“Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching.”
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
George Orwell Quotes on Truth
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
“In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.”
“Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth.”
“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.”
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. “
“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later, a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on the battlefield.”
“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.”
What do you think of all of these George Orwell quotes? Are there any particularly great ones we’re missing? Let us know in the comments section below!
brits have no real problems so invwnt nonsense freedoms
Never use a big word where a little one will do.
thank you for compiling this list by category!
(although it would have been good to have the book and page number, since you went to the trouble to begin with).
In any event, I thought he said that most people would CHOOSE happiness, not that it was “better.”
Do you think he meant that he thinks it’s better for them (paternalism) or or that they think it’s better for them?