32 Best George Orwell Quotes

George Orwell is one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. He wrote about the social injustices faced by the common man and the authoritarianism imposed upon them. His works depicted the political scenarios that revolved around the tyrannical pressures and the story of the victims who were led to destruction at the hands of the dictators.

Orwell is best known for his two dystopian novels, ‘1984‘ and ‘Animal Farm’. The combination of these two books is a perfect reflection of the ‘Orwellian’ concept, which revolves around a totalitarian state in which critical thought is suppressed and is detrimental to the welfare of a free and open society. It reflects on the system that makes us question our very existence as a result of the rules that confine us to our world and causes us to recognise patterns of autocracy and dictatorship in our own countries.

Here are the best George Orwell quotes:

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

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

3. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.

4. If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.

5. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

6. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

7. We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.

8. If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

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

10. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

11. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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

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

14. The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

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

16. Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

17. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

18. People that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.

19. Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness

20. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.

21. In the face of pain there are no heroes.

22. The only good human being is a dead one.

23. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

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

25. The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

26. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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

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

29. 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.

30. The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

31. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

32. Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

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