Top 100 Quotes About Orwell
#1. same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge," wrote Orwell, tends to be "uninterested in what happens in the real world." Nationalism
Timothy Snyder
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
Vijay Seshadri
#6. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - Orwell
Amie Kaufman
#7. Orwell couldn't see that Big Brother would not be The State, but The Corporation.
Laurence Overmire
#8. 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
#9. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Neil Postman
#10. 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
#11. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture. . . . Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Steven Garber
#12. I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
Aravind Adiga
#13. Whoa!" he says with a smile. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen. "Chicken salad a la George Orwell!
Haruki Murakami
#14. No, it's not [a book] Lana. It's an allegorical novella about Stalinism by George Orwell, and spoiler alert, IT SUCKS.
Sterling Archer
#15. I did not come to this country for the terror from paramilitary," declared Voytek, hoarsely. "I did not come to this country for motherfucker. But motherfucker is waiting. Always. Is carceral state, surveillance state. Orwell. You have read Orwell?
William Gibson
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Naomi Klein
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. As Orwell's pigs might have said, blue jeans good, new dress better.
Stephen King
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. If journalism were a religious order, George Orwell would be its patron saint.
Janadas Devan
#33. As accustomed as he was to the ever-expanding muscle of technology, even Jason Archer had to shake his head occasionally over what was really out there. Iris scanners were also used to closely monitor worker productivity. Jason grimaced. Truth be known, Orwell had actually underestimated.
David Baldacci
#34. Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.
Sarah Hall
#35. 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
#37. George Orwell knew when he wrote 1984: if you say a thing often enough, it will be accepted as truth.
Stephen King
#38. 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
#39. By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell,
Alain De Botton
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Yeah, but I forgot to take my George Orwell-shaped multivitamins along with my breakfast bowl of Big Brother Os this morning.
Jim Butcher
#44. George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
Atul Gawande
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.
Helmut Newton
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.
Arthur Levitt Jr
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. For Orwell, the loss of a life was the loss of a mind was the loss of a world, and the world we inhabit is poorer for each loss, for the contributions that mind could have made.
Josh Hanagarne
#56. Many of those who refer to Orwell seem not to have read much more than Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four, if those. The millions who have heard of Big Brother and Room 101 know nothing of their progenitor.
Peter Davidson
#57. Orwell was the sort of man who was full of grievances. He was very loyal. Once he got to know you, he was extremely loyal. He hated passionately and irrationally.
George Woodcock
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley;
David Mitchell
#61. Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call 'cultural studies.
Christopher Hitchens
#62. 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
#63. He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.
Cyril Connolly
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.
Max Hastings
#71. 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
#72. Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.
John Pilger
#73. Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother.
Alan Moore
#74. Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
W. H. Auden
#75. Orwell wasn't right about where society was in 1984. We haven't turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us.
Ramez Naam
#76. We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are.
Ben Aaronovitch
#77. 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
#78. Any satirist writing a futuristic novel who had imagined a President Reagan during the Eisenhower years would have been accused of perpetrating a piece of crude, contemptible, adolescent, anti-American wickedness, when, in fact, he would have succeeded, as prophetic sentry, where Orwell failed.
Philip Roth
#79. 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
#80. *For a fuller account of the revelations of the Moscow archives, and their detailed vindication of Orwell, see my Introduction to Orwell in Spain (Penguin, 2001).
Christopher Hitchens
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
Padgett Powell
#85. They are stupid, aren't they?" Dr. Orwell agreed, as though they were talking about the weather instead of insulting young children.
Lemony Snicket
#86. Since that time, war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.
George Orwell
#87. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.
George Orwell
#89. Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
#90. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past.
George Orwell
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions.
George Orwell
#95. 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
#96. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
George Orwell
#97. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in as in their rectified version
George Orwell
#98. 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
#100. The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
George Orwell
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