Orwell's Quotes

#1. You know, like, none of us would choose - no matter where we are in the world - would choose to you know become a member of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" world, but how much choice is really the question.

Sheena Iyengar

#2. George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech.

Christopher Lasch

#3. Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Christopher Hitchens

#4. The total effect of Orwell's work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor.

Raymond Williams

#5. The term Big Brother is from George Orwell's book 1984 - where everyone's watched over by a network of cameras called Big Brother. I've never understood why Orwell chose that phrase for somebody watching you all the time. Isn't that more like Creepy Uncle?

Craig Ferguson

#6. George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'.

Gideon Haigh

#7. For many, the recent disclosure of massive warrantless surveillance programs of all citizens by the Obama administration has brought back memories of George Orwell's '1984.' Another Orwell book seems more apt as the White House and its allies try to contain the scandal: 'Animal Farm.'

Jonathan Turley

#8. As Orwell's pigs might have said, blue jeans good, new dress better.

Stephen King

#9. Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.

J.G. Ballard

#10. Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

Sarah Hall

#11. Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.

Larry Wall

#12. The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.

Helmut Newton

#13. The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.

George Packer

#14. Sales of George Orwell's 1984 have skyrocketed. It's true. So the fallout from the (NSA spying) scandal is worse than we thought. It's forcing Americans to read.

Conan O'Brien

#15. This edition is based on Orwell's typescript of November 1948, amended according to his proof corrections and taking in a few readings that are deemed to be his from the American first edition.

George Orwell

#16. The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: "A foot stamping on a human face forever!" This is naive and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.

William S. Burroughs

#17. Inevitably those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell's 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be.

Thomas S. Kuhn

#18. Television has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system or government or church. It is the control center of most homes-more ubiquitous and more controlling than Orwell's Big Brother

R. Kent Hughes

#19. I concluded by saying that the SEALs in that room truly gave meaning to George Orwell's observation that "people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." page 546

Robert M. Gates

#20. Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.

Tad Williams

#21. If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

George Orwell

#22. I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

George Orwell

#23. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.

George Orwell

#24. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

George Orwell

#25. She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.

George Orwell

#26. It's a wonderful feeling to have a niece like you
Because you are always so dear
You are so dear no matter the year
But all throughout each day of the year
There could hardly be a town in the South of England where you
could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.

George Orwell

#27. The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

George Orwell

#28. The state was founded, actually, I think the year that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. And it's as if they sort of took the book and thought, I wonder if we could make this work?

Christopher Hitchens

#29. We may be together for another six months - a year - there's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?

George Orwell

#30. It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.

George Orwell

#31. There's time for everything except the things worth doing.

George Orwell

#32. It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.

George Orwell

#33. The other farmers sympathised in principle, but they did not at first give him much help. At heart, each of them was secretly wondering whether he could not somehow turn Jones's misfortune to his own advantage.

George Orwell

#34. At bottom it is always a writer's tendency, his "purpose," his "message," that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs.

George Orwell

#35. Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major's speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.

George Orwell

#36. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.

George Orwell

#37. That's the way we're going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else.

George Orwell

#38. No, it's not [a book] Lana. It's an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert, IT SUCKS.

Sterling Archer

#39. A bird's wing, comrades," he said, "is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg.

George Orwell

#40. I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

George Orwell

#41. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.

George Orwell

#42. Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else - that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.

George Orwell

#43. Who cares?' she said impatiently, 'it's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.

George Orwell

#44. There is nothing more dreadful in the world than to live in somebody else's house, eating his bread and doing nothing in return for it.

George Orwell

#45. I started understanding William Blake and George Orwell more and more. It's amazing how we go to school when we're so young, read all of these books, just trying to memorize them. When you start to live, you don't have to memorize anything.

Benjamin Clementine

#46. They were always cold, and usually hungry as well. Only Boxer and Clover never lost heart. Squealer made excellent speeches on the joy of service and the dignity of labor, but the other animals found more inspiration in Boxer's strength and his never-failing cry of I will work harder!

George Orwell

#47. Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles.

George Orwell

#48. I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially disgraced.

George Orwell

#49. If one harbors anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.

George Orwell

#50. Life's here to be lived, and if we're going to be in the soup next week - well, next week is a long way off.

George Orwell

#51. No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.

George Orwell

#52. As the yellow dawn comes up behind us, the Andalusian sentry, muffled in his cloak, begins singing. Across no-man's-land, a hundred or two hundred yards away, you can hear the Fascist sentry also singing. On

George Orwell

#53. The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a 'case', obscuring the opponent's point of view and avoiding awkward questions.

George Orwell

#54. I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.

George Orwell

#55. That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

George Orwell

#56. 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

#57. Of course George Orwell was not a saint - he could be unfaithful to his wife and suspicious of democracy, for starters - and it's a good thing, too, because saints are always hard to take seriously.

William Giraldi

#58. This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

George Orwell

#59. Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

George Orwell

#60. It's curious how it gets you down to have a sticky neck.

George Orwell

#61. I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

George Orwell

#62. It's shameful that today's mouthy political expositors aren't better versed in Orwell. Can you imagine a theatre director who hasn't studied Shakespeare?

William Giraldi

#63. If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.

George Orwell

#64. The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

George Orwell

#65. Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

George Orwell

#66. Don't think that I did nothing else. It's only that when you look back over a long period of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else.

George Orwell

#67. There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

George Orwell

#68. It was a good hanging," said Syme reminiscently. "I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue a quite bright blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.

George Orwell

#69. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against then, and every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

George Orwell

#70. People sleep peacefully in their beds at night, because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

(By George Orwell) Describing your country's servicemen.

Steven Preece

#71. Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart. Practically - i.e. in the form of society aimed at - the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable. The Communist's emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist's on liberty and equality.

George Orwell

#72. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.

George Orwell

#73. people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people

George Orwell

#74. Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.

George Orwell

#75. He (Orwell) always made an impression of the passing traveler who meets one on the station, points out that one is waiting for the wrong train, and vanishes

V.S. Pritchett

#76. I HAD learned early in my career that one can do wrong against one's will, and before long I also learned that one can do wrong without ever discovering what one has done or why it was wrong. There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that

George Orwell

#77. It's frightful that people who are so ignorant have so much influence.

George Orwell

#78. But though he could not recapture it, he could remember it, as one remembers a vivid experience at some period of one's life when one was in effect a different person.

George Orwell

#79. This was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

George Orwell

#80. If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.

George Orwell

#81. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

George Orwell

#82. It is perhaps one's own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.

George Orwell

#83. [Tolstoy] does not necessarily get rid of [his angry] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms.

George Orwell

#84. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:

George Orwell

#85. I read all the time so it's difficult to say who my all-time favourites are. One is George Orwell, because he makes political writing so simple a child could understand it.

Melvin Burgess

#86. In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.

George Orwell

#87. Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

George Orwell

#88. Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

George Orwell

#89. George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.

Arthur Levitt Jr

#90. If Orwell had a chance to write 1984 from the vantage point of 1984 instead of 1948, perhaps he would have seen the class of hackers instead of the proles as a threat to Big Brother's rule.

Ishmael Reed

#91. To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

George Orwell

#92. A 'alf-litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much.

George Orwell

#93. But a child's belief in its own shortcomings is not much influenced by facts.

George Orwell

#94. I do hope you'll forgive me if I overwhelm you with talk. When I meet somebody who's heard that books exist, I'm afraid I go off like a bottle of warm beer.

George Orwell

#95. I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?

George Orwell

#96. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre.

George Orwell

#97. With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.

Jay Parini

#98. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return,

George Orwell

#99. But of course we must never forget, Mrs. Pither, that there's a better world coming. This life is only a time of trial - just to strengthen us and teach us to be patient, so that we'll be ready for Heaven when the time comes.

George Orwell

#100. Fear! We swim in it. It's our element. Everyone that isn't scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Facism, or Communism, or something.

George Orwell