George Orwell Quotes

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

"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."

"At fifty everyone has the face he deserves."

"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."

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

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

"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?"

"Big Brother is watching you."

"A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."

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

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

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

"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."

"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."

"The existence of good bad literature /the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously /is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."

"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection."

"They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening"

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

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