Thought-Provoking George Orwell Quotes

International football is the continuation of war by other means.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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