“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.”
– George Orwell
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
– George Orwell
“Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.”
– George Orwell
“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”
– George Orwell
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
– George Orwell
“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
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
– George Orwell
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
– George Orwell
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
– George Orwell
“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
“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
– George Orwell
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
– George Orwell
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
– George Orwell
“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”
– George Orwell
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
– George Orwell
“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”
– George Orwell
“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
“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.”
– George Orwell
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
– George Orwell
“War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.”
– George Orwell
“Good writing is like a windowpane.”
– George Orwell
“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
“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
– George Orwell
“On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
– George Orwell
“He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.”
– George Orwell
“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
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
– George Orwell
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
– George Orwell
“Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”
– George Orwell
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
– George Orwell