Orwell Quotes For Today

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

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

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

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

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

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

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

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

LESS FAMOUS:

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

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

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

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

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.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

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