These George Orwell famous quotes from his best books 1984 & Animal Farm will make you think out of the box.
Eric Arthur Blair famous for his pen name George Orwell was born on 25 June 1903 was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. He is well known for his books Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Born in Bihar, India, Orwell’s father was a British colonial civil servant. He completed his education in England and went to Burma to work as a British Imperial Policeman. Later he dedicated himself to writing.
Orwell was a man of strong opinions who wrote on some important topics of his time and on politics. His work left quite an impact on popular and political culture. Many of his neologisms entered the language together including Orwellian, which describes an idea, situation, and societal condition that he identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society.
His writing style was vast including literary criticism and poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He also published a few books in the non-fiction genre such as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938).
Orwell’s 1984 book was a huge success but he did not get much time to enjoy it as he died a year later after the book got published, on January 21, 1950. Both of his novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have turned into the movie and enjoyed by many.
In 2008, Gorwell Orwell was ranked second among “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945” in The Times, and in honor of his work, a statue was installed in front of the BBC in London in 2016.
Here we are sharing a collection of George Orwell’s famous quotes from his most popular books of all time, Animal Farm and 1984 for you to stop and think.
George Orwell Quotes
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
― George Orwell
“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
― George Orwell
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
― George Orwell
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
― George Orwell
“If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”
― George Orwell, 1984
George Orwell 1984 Book Quotes
“If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
― George Orwell, 1984
“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves, and traitors are not victims… but accomplices”
― George Orwell
“In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
― George Orwell
“Of pain, you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain, there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“In the face of pain, there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“To die hating them, that was freedom.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The only good human being is a dead one.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
1984 Quotes About Control
“Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“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.”
― George Orwell
George Orwell Animal Farm Quotes
“Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“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?”
― George Orwell, 1984
“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.”
― George Orwell
“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
― George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950
“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.”
― George Orwell
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
― George Orwell
George Orwell 1984 Quotes About Truth
“Sanity is not statistical.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“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. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
― George Orwell
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
― George Orwell
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell
“All men are enemies. All animals are comrades”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
George Orwell Quotes On Communism And Socialism
“Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence and as difficult to attain.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The distinguishing mark of a man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on–that is, badly.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
― George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
― George Orwell
“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 from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell
“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 spurting out ink.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all around him. She had become a physical necessity.”
― George Orwell, 1984
George Orwell Quotes On Politics And Freedom
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell
“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The end was contained in the beginning.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“If there really is such a thing as turning in one’s grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercises.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now, do you begin to understand me?”
― George Orwell, 1984
George Orwell Famous Quotes And Sayings
“This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull. ”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“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.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
― George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book was rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Did you like these George Orwell quotes?
George Orwell was a man of strong beliefs and will always be remembered for his politically charged books. Even after so many years have passed for his books to be published, his work remains popular to this date because of its deep analysis of the psychology of power and the ways that manipulations of language and history can be used as tools of control.
We hope you get inspired by these George Orwell quotes and always stand for the truth like him.
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