65 George Orwell Quotes: Quotes on violence, truth & freedom

Eric Arthur Blair was known by his pen name George Orwell. He was an English novelist, essayist, and journalist.

George is known famous for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.

Here are some motivational quotes by George Orwell on topics such as truth, violence, freedom, intelligence, war, and from his famous books.

Best George Orwell Quotes

1. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ― George Orwell

2. “Myths which are believed in tend to become true.” ― George Orwell

3. “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.” ― George Orwell

4. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” ― George Orwell

5. “To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.” ― George Orwell

6. “Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.” ― George Orwell

7. “Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.” ― George Orwell

8. “Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance, life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.” ― George Orwell

9. “Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.” ― George Orwell

Bright future Quotes by George Orwell

10. “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” ― George Orwell

11. “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” ― George Orwell

George Orwell Quotes to be happy

12. “Happiness can exist only in acceptance.” ― George Orwell

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

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

15. “No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.” ― George Orwell

George Orwell Quotes on Truth

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

17. “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” ― George Orwell

George Orwell Quotes on Violence

18. “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.” ― George Orwell

19. “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” ― George Orwell

George Orwell Quotes on Intelligence

20. “There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” ― George Orwell

21. “Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.” ― George Orwell

22. “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” ― George Orwell

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

24. “Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.” ― George Orwell

George Orwell Quotes on Freedom

25. “Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― 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. “Liberal: a power worshipper without power.” ― George Orwell

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

29. “What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?” ― George Orwell

George Orwell Quotes on War

30. “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.” ― George Orwell

31. “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.” ― George Orwell

32. “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.” ― George Orwell

33. “War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.” ― George Orwell

George Orwell 1984 Quotes

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

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

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

37. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” ― George Orwell

38. “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” ― George Orwell

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

40. “If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.” ― George Orwell

41. “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.” ― George Orwell

42. “I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.” ― George Orwell

43. “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.” ― George Orwell

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

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

46. “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

47. “If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.” ― George Orwell

48. “If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.” ― George Orwell

49. “Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence and as difficult to attain.” ― George Orwell

50. “He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.” ― George Orwell

51. “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.” ― George Orwell

52. “Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.” ― George Orwell

53. “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” ― George Orwell

George Orwell Animal Farm Quotes

54. “Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interest of no creature except himself.” ― George Orwell

55. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” ― George Orwell

56. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.” ― George Orwell

57. “Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.” ― George Orwell

58. “Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers.” ― George Orwell

59. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” ― George Orwell

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

61. “All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.” ― George Orwell

62. “Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever.” ― George Orwell

63. “Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.” ― George Orwell

64. “No sentimentality, comrade…The only good human being is a dead one.” ― George Orwell

65. “Between pigs and human beings, there was not and there need not be any clash of interest whatsoever.” ― George Orwell

I hope you liked the above George Orwell Quotes. Don’t forget to mention the best line that you liked most from the above lines in the comment box below.

You may also like the motivational articles mentioned below:

Also, you can join our Instagram page to get daily positive lines or you can visit our Pinterest page to get motivational images.