George Orwell: Quotes that are relevant even today

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

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.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing..

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.

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

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.

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

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

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

The most efective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.