Looking for the best and inspirational George Orwell quotes?
George Orwell was a British novelist who wrote 1984. The novel describes a totalitarian state where all people are constantly monitored, and the individual is controlled.
In 1984, He created an imaginary world where people have no privacy and are spied on by telescreens with cameras and microphones. These telescreens transmit everything the person says to the government’s control room, where it is recorded and analyzed for potential criminal or rebellious thoughts.
Initially, He saw his work as a warning against what he regarded as misuse of language by propagandists who created misleading slogans intended to win public opinion.
Check out his inspiring quotes that will give you a kick in the butt, or at least make you stop for a second and think about what’s essential in life.
69 Inspiring George Orwell Quotes To Think Differently
“Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”
“Nothing exists except through human consciousness”
“There was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
“Will the man in the street ever feel that freedom of the mind is as important and as much in need of being defended as his daily bread?”
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”
“You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here” – he tapped his forehead – “and you’re all right.”
“If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”
“Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.”
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“The distinguishing mark of a man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“In every one of those little stucco boxes, there”s some poor bastard who”s never free except when he”s fast asleep and dreaming”
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
“So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
“Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching.”
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”― George Orwell
“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion.”
“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”
“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.”
“If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”― George Orwell
“Looking at the whole world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.”
“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.”
“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”
“There is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.”
“The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”
“The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
“Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.”
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
“History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
“People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” ― George Orwell
“The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”
“It is a horrible thing to have to enter into the details of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a cesspool.” ― George Orwel
“If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.”
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
“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.”
“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing”
“Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.”
“No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.”
“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
