Quotes by George Orwell

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

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

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

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

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

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

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

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

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

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

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

“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.”

“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.”

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.”

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word doublethink involved the use of doublethink.”