George Orwell, whose real name is Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, Journalist and critic. Orwell was known as a socialist critic, totalitarianism critic, and an advocate for democratic socialist.

Check out these George Orwell quotes on the world we need!

Here are 72 Awesome George Orwell Quotes:

1. “Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.” – George Orwell

2. “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.” – George Orwell

3. “The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.” – George Orwell

4. “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” – George Orwell

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

6. “In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.” – George Orwell

7. “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion.” – George Orwell

8. “It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.” – George Orwell

9. “In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.” – George Orwell

 

10. “The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.” – George Orwell

11. “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell

12. “Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching.” – George Orwell

13. “Will the man in the street ever feel that freedom of the mind is as important and as much in need of being defended as his daily bread?” – George Orwell

14. “The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.” – George Orwell

15. “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” – George Orwell

16. “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” – George Orwell

17. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” – George Orwell

18. “In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue.” – George Orwell

19. “It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.” – George Orwell

20. “Such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.” – George Orwell

21. “There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.” – George Orwell

22. “Power is not a means; it is an end.” – George Orwell

23. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” – George Orwell

24. “Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.” – George Orwell

25. “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” – George Orwell

26. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell

27. “That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.” – George Orwell

28. “Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth.” – George Orwell

29. “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.” – George Orwell

 

30. “You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’ – he tapped his forehead – ‘and you’re all right’.” – George Orwell

31. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” – George Orwell

32. “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.” – George Orwell

33. “In the face of pain there are no heroes.” – George Orwell

34. “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” – George Orwell

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36. “Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.” – George Orwell

37. “The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.” – George Orwell

38. “It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.” – George Orwell

39. “It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it.” – George Orwell

40. “The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.” – George Orwell

41. “In every one of those little stucco boxes, there’s some poor bastard who’s never free except when he’s fast asleep and dreaming,” – George Orwell

42. “For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.” – George Orwell

 

43. “No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? – George Orwell

44. “Poverty is spiritual halitosis.” – George Orwell

45. “The distinguishing mark of a man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.” – George Orwell

46. “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” – George Orwell

47. “No one can get up much enthusiasm for a Government which puts you in jail if you open your mouth.” – George Orwell

48. “He is a slave with a semblance of liberty which is worse than the most cruel slavery.” – George Orwell

49. “Faith, hope, money—only a saint could have the first two without having the third.” – George Orwell

50. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing… 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.” – George Orwell

51. “On the whole; human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” – George Orwell

52. “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.” – George Orwell

53. “This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.” – George Orwell

54. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” – George Orwell

55. “All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” – George Orwell

56. “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.” – George Orwell

57. “Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.” – George Orwell

58. “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.” – George Orwell

59. “To die hating them, that was freedom.” – George Orwell

60. “A world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.” – George Orwell

61. “In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it.” – George Orwell

62. “Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.” – George Orwell

 

63. “It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.” – George Orwell

64. “For before you can be sure whether you are genuinely in favor of socialism, you have got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult issue of class.” – George Orwell

65. “If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’. . . and you’re all right.” – George Orwell

66. “You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.” – George Orwell

67. “Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.” – George Orwell

68. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” – George Orwell

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.” – George Orwell

69. “You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.” – George Orwell

70. “Looking at the whole world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.” – George Orwell

71. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” – George Orwell

72. “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” – George Orwell

Which George Orwell quote is your favorite and why? Comment below!