Quotes by George Orwell

“An 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.”

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who dont even know that fire is hot.”

“Sanity is not statistical.”

“Throughout recorded time... there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.”

“He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.”

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesnt matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

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

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

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.

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

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.White to play and mate in two moves.Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

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

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

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.