1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

...one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring some improvement by starting at the verbal end....Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.-- 'Politics and the English Language,' 1946

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

We all rail against class-distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.

Given a mechanical civilisation the process of invention and improvement will always continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under capitalism any invention that does not promise fairly immediate profits are suppressed

The heirs of Nelson and Cromwell are not in the House of Lords. They are in the fields and in the streets, in the factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden; and at present they are still being kept under by a generation of ghosts.

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

You want a picture of the future? Imagine a boot trampling a human face.. forever. The moral to be drawn from this nightmarish situation is simple: Don't let it happen. It depends on you.

...the groveling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.

As for queueing-up, during the past five or ten years it has become what the psychologists call a conditioned reflex. If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue almost instinctively.