Quotes from George Orwell

Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

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?

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.

I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.

It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.

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.

The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

...the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.