Orwell Quotes

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

Big Brother is Watching You.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

Reality was mediocrity.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

Until they became conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

The proles are not human beings.

In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies…

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.

For, if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would learn to think for themselves.

Doublethink is the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.

The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.

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.

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.

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

In the face of pain, there are no heroes.

The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?

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

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything.

Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.