George Orwell

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. All issues are political issues.”

“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.”

“Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.”

“He said that the education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who are already grown up.”

“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. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them...”

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

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

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

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

“War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.”

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

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

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

“Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.”

“One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.”

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

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

“Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.”

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

“Good writing is like a windowpane.”

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

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

“At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.”

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

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

“This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”

“...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.”

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

“One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.”

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

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

“We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:”

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

“Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.”

“No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.”

“Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”

“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.”

“I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.”

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

“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.”

“We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

“There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.”

“What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.”

“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”

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

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”

“Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.”

“Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.”

“Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”

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

“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.”

“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”

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

“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”

“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.”

“I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.”

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

“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.”

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself sile...”