George Orwell Quotes On Freedom, Truth, Power & Society

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

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

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

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

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.

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

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

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

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