Quotes from George Orwell

One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

The ruling power is always faced with the question, 'In such and such circumstances, what would you do?', whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.

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.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.

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

It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

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.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.

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.

She was very young...she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

I have no wish to take life, not even human life

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

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