George Orwell: ‘At 50, Everyone Has the Face They Deserve’

British author George Orwell once said: “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

This quote has been attributed to Orwell for years, appearing widely on social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as on various quote-meme websites. It has also been included in multiple print anthologies of quotes.

Historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill often attract falsely attributed quotes, and Orwell is no exception. However, in this case, the quote genuinely belongs to him.

Using the Internet Archive’s full-text search function reveals nearly 300 sources where this quote is mentioned. One notable source is “In Front of Your Nose: 1945–1950,” the fourth volume of “Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell.” First published in 1968 and co-edited by Sonia Orwell, his wife, and Ian Angus, the quote appears on page 515 in a section titled, “Extracts from a Manuscript Note-book.” The entry containing the quote is dated April 17, 1949.

In an introductory note to this section, the volume’s editors wrote that during the last year of his life, Orwell kept a manuscript notebook for notes on various literary projects. These included ideas for a long short story, “A Smoking Room Story,” and essays on Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh. The notebook also contains sporadic jottings, from which the quoted material is drawn.

Snopes tracked down a digitized version of this notebook, hosted online by University College London’s George Orwell Archive. The quote appears in Orwell’s handwriting on page 30 of this digitized version, at the bottom of the left page.

Although this quote is authentic, misinformation occasionally circulates alongside it. Some social media users have incorrectly claimed it represents Orwell’s last written words. This incorrect notion has also been featured in traditional publications, including a 2010 anthology titled “Last Words of Notable People.” This anthology cited Ralph Keyes’ 2006 book “The Quote Verifier,” which described the quote as “the last words Orwell wrote in his notebook.”

However, Snopes found that the digitized notebook contains several pages written after this quote. The last specific date found was December 16, 1949—about eight months after Orwell jotted down this quote, and one month before his death on January 21, 1950, at the age of 46. This date was clearly marked on page 31 of the notebook in British format as “16-12-49.”

In essence, “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves” was not Orwell’s final sentence. It was merely the last excerpt included in the fourth volume of his collected essays and journal entries.

Nonetheless, the presence of the quote in Orwell’s own handwriting in one of his notebooks provides adequate evidence for its correct attribution. Thus, Snopes has rated the claim that Orwell once said, “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves,” as a “Correct Attribution.”