Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, was a brilliant English writer of the 20th century who transformed literature with his piercing social commentary and allegorical style. Considered classics, his novels Animal Farm and 1984 are read in classrooms around the world. His works have become so entrenched in popular and political culture that the term “Orwellian” is now commonly used to describe totalitarian and authoritarian societies.
Orwell also wrote numerous nonfiction books and essays documenting his own life experiences, which similarly express his gift for satire and controversial views on government. Throughout his writing career, he never feared tackling challenging topics and expressing his opinions, no matter how subversive. Read on for George Orwell’s best quotes about truth, reality, freedom, politics, power, and money.
Quotes About Truth & Reality
The concepts of truth and reality are major themes in many of Orwell’s novels—especially the chilling dystopian classic, 1984. As Orwell asserts, reality is what you make of it, but the truth isn’t always so clear.
"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” - George Orwell, 1984
“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”― George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” – George Orwell, 1984
“This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.” – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
"It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you." – George Orwell, 1984
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
“In the face of pain there are no heroes.” – George Orwell, 1984
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
"And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested." – George Orwell, 1984
"If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth." – George Orwell, 1984
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ” – George Orwell, 1984
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.” – George Orwell, 1984
Quotes About Freedom
Many of Orwell’s works center around freedom and oppression—whether political or personal—as he seeks to define what being free truly means and questions what kind of freedom is worth living or dying for.
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” – George Orwell, 1984
"Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.” – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
“Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.” – George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“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.” – George Orwell, 1984
“I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.” – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
“To die hating them, that was freedom.” – George Orwell, 1984
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
“We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.” – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
“That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.” – George Orwell, 1984
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." – George Orwell, 1984
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Politics & Power Quotes
Political commentary is Orwell’s staple. His strong opposition to totalitarianism is clear throughout 1984 and Animal Farm as he criticizes the political structures in those stories, while his support of democratic socialism is apparent throughout his nonfiction works such as Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” – George Orwell, 1984
“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.” – George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“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.” – George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“For before you can be sure whether you are genuinely in favour of socialism, you have got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult issue of class.” – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” – George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” – George Orwell, 1984
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” – George Orwell, 1984
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?" — George Orwell, Animal Farm
“In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it.” – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
“It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.” – George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
“Power is not a means; it is an end.” – George Orwell, 1984
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing... Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm
Quotes About Money
Orwell’s opinions on money tie into his political views—especially his opposition to powerful authoritarian governments. In his youth, he witnessed poverty firsthand, leading to a satirical attitude towards money and how it shapes society.
“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.” – George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
“For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.” – George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.” – George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
“You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.” – George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.” – George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
“Poverty is spiritual halitosis.” – George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I'm a free man in here’. . . and you're all right.” – George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
"In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.” – George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
“In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue.” – George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
“Faith, hope, money—only a saint could have the first two without having the third.” – George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.” – George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
