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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.

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

— George Orwell

Intelligence

All Quotes by George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

Food

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

— George Orwell

Truth

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

— George Orwell

Age

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

— George Orwell

Time

“War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.”

— George Orwell

War

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

— George Orwell

Future

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

— George Orwell

War

“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

“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

“A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

— George Orwell

Family

“War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.”

— 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

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

— George Orwell

Men

“If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?”

— George Orwell

Politics

“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.”

— George Orwell

Jealousy

“As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”

— George Orwell

Religion

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

— George Orwell

Happiness

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

— George Orwell

Funny

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

— George Orwell

Freedom

“Four legs good, two legs bad.”

— George Orwell

Good