Top 100 Quotes About George Orwell
#1. Since that time, war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.
George Orwell
#2. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.
George Orwell
#4. Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
#5. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past.
George Orwell
#6. To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
George Orwell
#7. 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
#8. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes
George Orwell
#9. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions.
George Orwell
#10. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.
George Orwell
#11. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
George Orwell
#12. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in as in their rectified version
George Orwell
#13. In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people, ... [t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.
George Orwell
#15. The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
George Orwell
#16. If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
[Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945]
George Orwell
#17. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
George Orwell
#18. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
George Orwell
#19. For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven
George Orwell
#20. The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
George Orwell
#21. What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.
George Orwell
#22. Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache ... whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
George Orwell
#23. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell
#24. 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
#26. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.
George Orwell
#27. She 'didn't care much for reading', she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
George Orwell
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. You understand, that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark.
George Orwell
#31. If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.
George Orwell
#32. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
George Orwell
#33. The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable ...
George Orwell
#34. Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.
George Orwell
#35. All saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent.
George Orwell
#36. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
George Orwell
#37. 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
#38. to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.
George Orwell
#39. Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four.
George Orwell
#40. It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.
George Orwell
#41. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
George Orwell
#42. Then Snowball (for it was Snowball who was best at writing) took a brush between the two knuckles of his trotter, painted out MANOR FARM from the top bar of the gate and in its place painted ANIMAL FARM. This was to be the name of the farm from now onwards.
George Orwell
#43. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
George Orwell
#44. 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
#45. To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.
George Orwell
#46. We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and
somehow never can.
George Orwell
#47. The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.
George Orwell
#49. Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
George Orwell
#50. General state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By
George Orwell
#51. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.
George Orwell
#52. By preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.
George Orwell
#53. The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.
George Orwell
#54. Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
George Orwell
#55. I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
George Orwell
#56. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
George Orwell
#57. Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.
George Orwell
#58. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.
George Orwell
#59. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts,
only the knowledge that they must die in order that he
might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoid-
able order of things.
George Orwell
#60. It is always so with titled people, they are either adored or hated.
George Orwell
#61. When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.
George Orwell
#62. Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.
George Orwell
#63. I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got a wife that I can't get rid of. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth.
George Orwell
#64. Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
George Orwell
#65. For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell
#66. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.
George Orwell
#67. Public opinion is less tolerant than any system of law.
George Orwell
#68. purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government. The
George Orwell
#69. There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways.
George Orwell
#70. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realisable.
George Orwell
#71. At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.
George Orwell
#72. For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.
James Gleick
#73. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining
George Orwell
#74. Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.
George Orwell
#75. Mr. Upward italicises "at the present time" because he realises that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist.
George Orwell
#77. It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
George Orwell
#78. Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
George Orwell
#80. The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.
George Orwell
#81. 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
#82. 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
#84. Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
George Orwell
#85. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.
George Orwell
#86. And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.
George Orwell
#87. Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
George Orwell
#88. All human relationships must be purchased with money.
George Orwell
#89. The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.
George Orwell
#90. We believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does ... unless conquered from the outside by military force?
George Orwell
#91. The Americans always go one better on any kind of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering or theosophy.
George Orwell
#92. I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
George Orwell
#93. It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists. They
George Orwell
#94. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.
George Orwell
#95. I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: 'Anthem,' by Ayn Rand; '1984,' by George Orwell; or 'Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley.
Sara Shepard
#96. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
George Orwell
#97. During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
#98. 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
#99. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction.
George Orwell
#100. It has been denied that any direct pressure was exerted by the Russian Government, but the point is not of great importance, for the Communist parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy, and it is not denied that the Communist Party was the chief
George Orwell
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