Top 10 George Orwell Quotes
In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
Big Brother is watching you.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
Power is not a means; it is an end.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue.
The object of persecution is persecution.
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves, and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life.
In the face of pain, there are no heroes.
A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.
The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed.
Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciously accepting everything said by one’s superiors.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.
To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Power is not a means; it is an end.
The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been against totalitarianism.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
Sanity is not statistical.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out.
The only way to overthrow a dictatorship is for the outside world to refuse to recognize it.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life.
There is no greater heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Man is the only creature who consumes without producing.
We have become so used to the idea of divine right of kings, and to fighting for king and country, that the thought of another kind of society hardly enters our heads.