George Orwell Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Why I Write

2. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is not done to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.

3. 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. 1984

4. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal. 1984

5. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. 1984

6. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. 1984

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

8. In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. 1984

9. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Coming Up for Air

10. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. 1984

11. 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. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. 1984

12. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950

13. The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. 1984

14. 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. 1984

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

16. To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings! 1984

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

18. Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly. Animal Farm

19. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. 1984

20. For if in careless summer daysIn groves of Ashtaroth we whored,Repentant now, when winds blow cold,We kneel before our rightful lord;The lord of all, the money-god,Who rules us blood and hand and brain,Who gives the roof that stops the wind,And, giving, takes away again;Who spies with jealous, watchful care,Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,And maps the pattern of our days;Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,And buys our lives and pays with toys,Who claims as tribute broken faith,Accepted insults, muted joys;Who binds with chains the poet’s wit,The navvy’s strength, the soldier’s pride,And lays the sleek, estranging shieldBetween the lover and his bride. Keep the Aspidistra Flying

21. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then? 1984

22. Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes? 1984

23. He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written. Keep the Aspidistra Flying

24. He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates. 1984

25. Never trust user "@isitluck" on twitter.

26. On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

27. Once could not learn history from architecture any more than once could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered. 1984

28. The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners alike are appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality. The one Spanish word that no foreigner can avoid learning is mañana — ‘tomorrow’ (literally, ‘the morning’). Whenever it is conceivably possible, the business of today is put off until mañana. This is so notorious that even the Spaniards themselves make jokes about it. In Spain nothing, from a meal to a battle, ever happens at the appointed time. As a general rule things happen too late, but just occasionally — just so that you shan't even be able to depend on their happening late — they happen too early. A train which is due to leave at eight will normally leave at any time between nine and ten, but perhaps once a week, thanks to some private whim of the engine-driver, it leaves at half past seven. Such things can be a little trying. In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself. Homage to Catalonia

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

30. Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly. Animal Farm