Quotes from George Orwell

...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

It [England] is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.

it was only a hopeless fantasy, it passed like an april day, but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred they have stolen my heart away.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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.

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose

True freedom is the right to say something that others don't want to hear.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear

There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.