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George Orwell Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from George Orwell


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There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.


The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.


The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.


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


Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.


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.


As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.


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


Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.


The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.


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


Happiness can exist only in acceptance.


Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.


To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.


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


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


The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.


In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.


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


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