Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
George Orwell

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
George Orwell

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
George Orwell

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
George Orwell

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell

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

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

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
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 atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
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

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
George Orwell

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
George Orwell

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
George Orwell

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
George Orwell

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 squirting out ink.
George Orwell