"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" is the phrase that ends, in devastating silence, the animal revolution at the Manor Farm. It is not an error in logic nor an oversight by the pigs who write it on the barn wall. It is the exact formula for how an ideal empties itself inside without ever being formally abolished.
One commandment, seven versions
When the animals drive out Mr Jones and take over the farm, they write seven commandments on the barn wall, summarized in a single principle: all animals are equal. It's the founding promise of the revolution, the reason it was worth kicking out the farmer.
Throughout the book, each commandment is silently altered to justify a new privilege for the pigs. "No animal will sleep in a bed" gets the addendum "with sheets". "No animal shall drink alcohol" becomes "to excess." With each change, the animals that still remember the original text doubt their own memory, and that's where Squealer comes in, convincing them that it's always been like this.
The final rewrite
The last commandment to be changed is the most important, because it is the only one that summarizes all the others: "all animals are equal." A clause is added to it that destroys, with seven words, the entire meaning of the revolution:
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Grammatically, the sentence is absurd: equality does not admit degree. It is exactly this absurdity that makes it so necessary. It does not deny equality, it maintains it as a word, emptying it as a concept. Pigs don't have to admit that they betrayed the original ideal; just rewrite it until betrayal seems like the natural continuation of the same principle.
Why this formula works like manipulation
The central trick is that the sentence preserves the structure of the original promise. Anyone who hears "all animals are equal" continues to recognize the founding motto of the revolution, which gives the second part of the phrase, "but some are more equal", a borrowed legitimacy that it would not have on its own. It is the same mechanism described in more detail in the concept of doublethink, which Orwell would develop even more explicitly in 1984: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, accepting both as true.
Betrayal that doesn't need a blow
What makes this phrase so disturbing is that it does not describe a violent rupture with the revolutionary ideal, it describes a gradual erosion, commandment by commandment, until the original equality becomes just an echo in the memory of the older animals, and even that memory is called into doubt. There was no moment when the farm decided to abandon equality: there were hundreds of small language adjustments, each too small to provoke outrage.
This is why the phrase continues to be cited far beyond the context of the Russian Revolution that inspired it. It names a mechanism that is repeated whenever a power needs to maintain the appearance of a principle that it has already abandoned in practice: maintaining the official language intact while its meaning is replaced by another, without warning and without debate. To see how this mechanism fits into the farm's full arc, from its initial dream to its corruption, it's worth going back to summary and analysis of the work and watch the full lesson that gave rise to this reading.
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What does “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” mean?
It is the final rewrite of the first commandment of the animal revolution, "all animals are equal." By adding "but some are more equal than others", the pigs in power keep the original formula intact in appearance, while completely inverting its meaning: equality becomes privilege in disguise.
Why is this phrase considered the most famous in Animal Farm?
Because it condenses into a single line the entire argument of the book: how a revolutionary ideal can be corrupted without ever being formally revoked, just rewritten bit by bit until the original meaning disappears.
Who rewrites the commandments in the work and why?
Squealer, the propagandist pig, is the one who convinces the other animals, night after night, that their memories of the original commandments are wrong. It is a direct allusion to Soviet propaganda and the rewriting of history to sustain the power of those in charge.
Go deeper: Animal Farm, by George Orwell: summary and analysis · The characters in Animal Farm and who they represent · What is doublethink? · Free will in Macbeth: destiny or choice?
Source lesson (YouTube): A Revolução dos Bichos, de George Orwell (NousCast)