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George Orwell

57 quotes

George Orwell (1903–1950) was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English novelist, essayist, and critic best known for the allegorical novella *Animal Farm* and the dystopian novel *Nineteen Eighty-Four*. His clear, direct prose style and fierce opposition to totalitarianism made him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”

— George Orwell

War

All Quotes by George Orwell

“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”

— George Orwell

War

“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.”

— George Orwell

Fear

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

— George Orwell

Patriotism

“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 squirting out ink.”

— George Orwell

Great

“Good writing is like a windowpane.”

— George Orwell

Good

“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.”

— George Orwell

Power

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

— George Orwell

Power

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

— George Orwell

Age

“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

War

“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.”

— George Orwell

War

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

— George Orwell

Men

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

— George Orwell

Time

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

— George Orwell

Happiness

“Oceania was at war with Eurasia therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”

— George Orwell

War

“Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”

— George Orwell

Power

“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.”

— George Orwell

Future

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

— George Orwell

Power

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

— George Orwell

Food

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

— George Orwell

Good

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

— George Orwell

Truth