George Orwell Quotes And Sayings

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.

Men Are Only As Good As Their Technical Development Allows Them To Be.

The Catholic And The Communist Are Alike In Assuming That An Opponent Cannot Be Both Honest And Intelligent.

There Are Some Ideas So Wrong That Only A Very Intelligent Person Could Believe In Them.

The Best Books... Are Those That Tell You What You Know Already.

The Very Concept Of Objective Truth Is Fading Out Of The World. Lies Will Pass Into History.

Whatever Is Funny Is Subversive, Every Joke Is Ultimately A Custard Pie... A Dirty Joke Is A Sort Of Mental Rebellion.

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad.

The Aim Of A Joke Is Not To Degrade The Human Being, But To Remind Him That He Is Already Degraded.

Patriotism Is Usually Stronger Than Class Hatred, And Always Stronger Than Internationalism.

The Essential Act Of War Is Destruction, Not Necessarily Of Human Lives, But Of The Products Of Human Labor.

I'm Fat, But I'm Thin Inside... There's A Thin Man Inside Every Fat Man.

Enlightened People Seldom Or Never Possess A Sense Of Responsibility.

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.

But If Thought Corrupts Language, Language Can Also Corrupt Thought.

All Animals Are Equal, But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.

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?

Progress Is Not An Illusion, It Happens, But It Is Slow And Invariably Disappointing.

To Walk Through The Ruined Cities Of Germany Is To Feel An Actual Doubt About The Continuity Of Civilization.

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.

Sometimes The First Duty Of Intelligent Men Is The Restatement Of The Obvious.

Language Ought To Be The Joint Creation Of Poets And Manual Workers.

Political Chaos Is Connected With The Decay Of Language... One Can Probably Bring About Some Improvement By Starting At The Verbal End.

In Our Time Political Speech And Writing Are Largely The Defense Of The Indefensible.

War Is War. The Only Good Human Being Is A Dead One.

One Does Not Establish A Dictatorship In Order To Safeguard A Revolution; One Makes A Revolution In Order To Establish A Dictatorship.

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.

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.

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.

War Is Evil, But It Is Often The Lesser Evil.

At Fifty Everyone Has The Face He Deserves.

One Cannot Really Be A Catholic And Grown Up.

We Sleep Safe In Our Beds Because Rough Men Stand Ready In The Night To Visit Violence On Those Who Would Do Us Harm.

Mankind Is Not Likely To Salvage Civilization Unless He Can Evolve A System Of Good And Evil Which Is Independent Of Heaven And Hell.

Joyce Is A Poet And Also An Elephantine Pedant.

To Survive It Is Often Necessary To Fight And To Fight You Have To Dirty Yourself.

Advertising Is The Rattling Of A Stick Inside A Swill Bucket.

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.

We Have Now Sunk To A Depth At Which Restatement Of The Obvious Is The First Duty Of Intelligent Men.

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.

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.

No Advance In Wealth, No Softening Of Manners, No Reform Or Revolution Has Ever Brought Human Equality A Millimeter Nearer.

Good Writing Is Like A Windowpane.

Freedom Is The Freedom To Say That Two Plus Two Make Four. If That Is Granted, All Else Follows.

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.

As I Write, Highly Civilized Human Beings Are Flying Overhead, Trying To Kill Me.

A Family With The Wrong Members In Control; That, Perhaps, Is As Near As One Can Come To Describing England In A Phrase.

We May Find In The Long Run That Tinned Food Is A Deadlier Weapon Than The Machine-gun.

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.

All The War-propaganda, All The Screaming And Lies And Hatred, Comes Invariably From People Who Are Not Fighting.