Top 100 Quotes About George Orwell
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
Aravind Adiga
#5. Whoa!" he says with a smile. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. "Chicken salad a la George Orwell!
Haruki Murakami
#6. No, it's not [a book] Lana. It's an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert, IT SUCKS.
Sterling Archer
#7. George Orwell said, "Whoever controls the past controls the future," by which he meant that history is incredibly important in shaping the world view of the next generation of people.
Howard Zinn
#8. Famous INFPs include Isabel Myers (creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), St. John the disciple, Carl Rogers, Princess Diana, George Orwell, Audrey Hepburn, Fred Rogers, A.A. Milne, Helen Keller, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Julia Roberts, and William Shakespeare.
Molly Owens
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Naomi Klein
#12. In 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun.
Barbara Demick
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. GEORGE ORWELL
J. Budziszewski
#17. My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.
Gary Kemp
#18. 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
#19. Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.
Kurt Vonnegut
#20. If journalism were a religious order, George Orwell would be its patron saint.
Janadas Devan
#22. George Orwell knew when he wrote 1984: if you say a thing often enough, it will be accepted as truth.
Stephen King
#23. What is it that unites, on the left of British politics, George Orwell, Billy Bragg, Gordon Brown and myself? An understanding that identity and a sense of belonging need to be linked to our commitment to nationhood and a modern form of patriotism.
David Blunkett
#24. By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell,
Alain De Botton
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Yeah, but I forgot to take my George Orwell-shaped multivitamins along with my breakfast bowl of Big Brother Os this morning.
Jim Butcher
#28. George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
Atul Gawande
#29. George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer ... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.
Haruki Murakami
#30. 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
#31. It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are. - GEORGE ORWELL, The Road to Wigan Pier
Gretchen Rubin
#32. Unless we can restore what George Orwell called patriotism as opposed to nationalism, we will see the rise of the far right, as is happening already in Europe.
Jonathan Sacks
#33. We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.' - George Orwell
Conn Iggulden
#34. George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.
Arthur Levitt Jr
#35. Panky thinking: We had nuclear holocaust on our lips, Big Brother on our minds, 1984 was just around the corner and we were shit scared about the future - George Orwell and Margaret Thatcher had a lot to answer for.
Peter L Masters
#36. 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
#37. The fashionable idiocy that haters must have justifications is one of those ideas that George Orwell said only an intellectual could believe
because no one else could be such a fool.
Thomas Sowell
#38. Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
Christopher Hitchens
#39. He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.
Cyril Connolly
#40. 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
#41. To penetrate the unknown, the mind must begin with what is known already. George Orwell wrote that "We have now sunk to a depth at which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." This book is an attempt at re-statement.
J. Budziszewski
#42. I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.
Jill Lepore
#43. As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.
Max Hastings
#44. 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
#45. We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf"
Opening to "My Father's Son," attributed to George Orwell
George Orwell
#46. Every street in London has a camera, and if you ever travel up the M4, it feels as if George Orwell should be your chauffeur.
Don McCullin
#47. It seems appropriate that the author of '1984' was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public's lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state.
Heather Brooke
#48. Since that time, war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.
George Orwell
#49. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.
George Orwell
#51. Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
#52. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past.
George Orwell
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions.
George Orwell
#57. 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
#58. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
George Orwell
#59. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in as in their rectified version
George Orwell
#60. 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
#62. The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
George Orwell
#63. 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
#64. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
George Orwell
#65. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
George Orwell
#66. For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven
George Orwell
#67. 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
#68. What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.
George Orwell
#69. 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
#70. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. You understand, that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark.
George Orwell
#78. If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.
George Orwell
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. All saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent.
George Orwell
#83. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
George Orwell
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four.
George Orwell
#87. 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
#88. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
George Orwell
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and
somehow never can.
George Orwell
#93. The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.
George Orwell
#95. Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
George Orwell
#96. General state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By
George Orwell
#97. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.
George Orwell
#98. 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
#99. The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.
George Orwell
#100. 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
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