George Orwell quotes:

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

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 round the sun.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

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

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

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

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

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.

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.

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.

Big Brother is watching you.

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

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

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.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

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

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.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.

the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer? You know the answer, of course.

Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.

A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within the sound of the guns.

Nearly all soldiers, and this applies even to professional soldiers in peacetime, have a sane attitude towards war. They realise that it is disgusting, and that it may often be necessary

[Football] 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.

In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last

a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

Had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins"

Recently I was reading somewhere or other an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th century crucifix to J.P. Morgan. Inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion.

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.

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.

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.

In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer...

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state - however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.

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

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.

In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

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.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature, Frederick and Pilkington said.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me--

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree.

It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak.

Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.

Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

...in the negative part of Professor's Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

International football is the continuation of war by other means.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

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?

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.

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 any one meaning.

"A minority of one"... the definition of insanity.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.... Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness.

Creeds like pacifism or 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 ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it.

Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.