George Orwell Quotes | GloryQuotes

George Orwell Quotes About War

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

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

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

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

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

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

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

George Orwell Quotes About Honesty

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

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

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

More Quotes by George Orwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

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

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

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

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

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

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

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

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

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

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

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

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

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

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Browse 104 quotes attributed to George Orwell, listed in the source data as a British Author, organized around themes such as War, Honesty, Writing. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.