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Food
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We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
-George Orwell
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Freedom
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Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-George Orwell
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I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
-George Orwell
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Future, The
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Power is not a means; it is an end....
Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself....
The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy - everything.... No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends....
We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.... There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless....
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
-George Orwell, 1984
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Goodness
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On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
-George Orwell
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Happiness
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Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness
-George Orwell
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Heroes/Heroism
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The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
-George Orwell, The Art of Donald McGill
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History
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History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
-George Orwell, essay
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Kindness
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One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.
-George Orwell
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Language
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To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
-George Orwell
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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
-George Orwell
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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 spurting out ink.
-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946
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Legacy
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Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
-George Orwell
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Liberalism
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A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
-George Orwell
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Love
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To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
-George Orwell
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Maturity
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Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
-George Orwell
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Military, the
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To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.
-George Orwell
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Modern, Modernism
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The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
-George Orwell
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Myths, Mythology
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Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
-George Orwell
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
-George Orwell
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News
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Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
-George Orwell
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Nudity
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The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.
-George Orwell, 1984, Pt 1 ch 3
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Past, the
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Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
-George Orwell
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He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 2, ch. 9, 1949
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Perfection
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The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.
-George Orwell
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Books by and about George Orwell