George Orwell Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of George Orwell's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Novelist George Orwell's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 767 quotes on this page collected since June 25, 1903! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

    Writing  
    George Orwell (2016). “Homage to Catalonia / Down and Out in Paris and London”, p.268, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

    "Politics and the English Language" (1946)
  • Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers.

    George Orwell (1986). “Coming Up for Air”, Harvill Secker
  • The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

    George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.282, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

    Peace  
    George Orwell's review of the book "The Men I Killed" by Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier in "New Statesman and Nation", August 28, 1937.
  • There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

    George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.320, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

    George Orwell (2012). “Down and Out in Paris and London”, p.14, Lulu.com
  • The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ... War is Peace.

    George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.431, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

    George Orwell (1986). “The complete works of George Orwell”
  • All art is propaganda.

    George Orwell (1998). “A patriot after all, 1940-1941”, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
  • You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

    George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.539, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

    Writing  
    George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.279, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing.

    George Orwell (2009). “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays”, p.215, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

    George Orwell (2001). “The Complete Novels of George Orwell: Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four”, p.1351, Penguin UK
  • I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

    George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.315, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.

    George Orwell (2014). “1984”, p.45, Arcturus Publishing
  • And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

    George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.169, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.

    George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.311, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

    George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1986). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: The road to Wigan Pier”
  • He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

    George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.128, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

  • The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

    George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.357, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.

    George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.159, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

    George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.272, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • [T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality.:; Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?

    George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944”
  • It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

    "George Orwell: A Life in Letters".
  • The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

  • After 40, a man is responsible for his face.

  • All human relationships must be purchased with money.

    George Orwell (1956). “The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage”, New York : Harcourt, Brace
  • A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as "robust.

    George Orwell (1976). “The Penguin complete novels of George Orwell”
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We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 767 quotes from the Novelist George Orwell, starting from June 25, 1903! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!