The 20 Best Quotes from George Orwell

Not only were George Orwell’s books Animal Farm and 1984 all-time classics, they were all-time classics that dealt with the dangers of overly powerful government and outright totalitarianism. Over the course of history, you have to wonder how many times some government wanted to implement a draconian policy but decided against it because it sounded too close to something from 1984 and thus, would be instantly recognized by people as tyrannical.

Orwell was a towering genius of an author, but in the process, he managed to become one of the most powerful advocates of limited government, freedom, and suspicion of government motives that ever lived, which makes him a truly great man who did an amazing service for his fellow human beings.

PS: Orwell has some famous lines from his books that were left off because they didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense out of context, and I wanted each quote to stand alone. For example, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” or “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

20) “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

19) “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

18) “In practice, nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.”

17) “The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

16) “Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.”

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

14) “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.”

13) “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.”

12) “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 spurting out ink.”

11) “Power is not a means; it is an end.”

10) “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.”

9) “Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

8) “All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.”

7) “All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

6) “Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.”

5) “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

4) “Men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard them.”

3) “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

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

1) “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

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