George Orwell Quotes
"The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him." - George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950) British author Source: Inside the Whale, 1940
"The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering - a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons - a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face." George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.”
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.”
“"Doublethink" means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it”
“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.”
“(Doublethink) to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed”
“Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”
“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time”
“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.”
“Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings”
“To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”
“The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”
“It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”
“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”
“For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.”
“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.”
“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”
“A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.”
"People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome." - George Orwell