Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. – George Orwell
War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent. – George Orwell
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. – George Orwell
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. – George Orwell
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. – George Orwell
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. – George Orwell
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. – George Orwell
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. – George Orwell
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. – George Orwell
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. – George Orwell
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. – George Orwell
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? – George Orwell
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. – George Orwell
If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves that you are in the right? – George Orwell
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment. – George Orwell
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them. – George Orwell
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. – George Orwell
For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity. – George Orwell