1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

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

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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

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.

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

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.