Quotes & Sayings About Orwell

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O'Brien: Of course he exists.
Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?
O'Brien: You do not exist. — George Orwell

If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. — George Orwell

For, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches. — George Orwell

Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy, or integrity. You will be hollow. — George Orwell

Referring to Russian commissars as half-gramophones, half-gangsters. — George Orwell

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite — George Orwell

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. — George Orwell

The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed. — George Orwell

His importance to the century just past, and therefore his status as a figure in history as well as in literature, derives from the extraordinary salience of the subjects he 'took on,' and stayed with, and never abandoned. As a consequence, we commonly use the term 'Orwellian' in one of two ways. To describe a state of affairs as 'Orwellian' is to imply crushing tyranny and fear and conformism. To describe a piece of writing as 'Orwellian' is to recognize that human resistance to these terrors is unquenchable. Not bad for one short lifetime. — Christopher Hitchens

The idea is always bigger than the man'. — George Orwell

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail. — George Orwell

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY — George Orwell

At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning. — George Orwell

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. — George Orwell

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

Reality is inside the skull. — George Orwell

About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four , was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less. — John Lukacs

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. — George Orwell

That evening Squealer explained privately to the other animals that Napoleon had never in reality been opposed to the windmill. On the contrary, it was he who had advocated it in the beginning, and the plan which Snowball had drawn on the floor of the incubator shed had actually been stolen from among Napoleon's papers. The windmill was, in fact, Napoleon's own creation. Why, then, asked somebody, had he spoken so strongly against it? Here Squealer looked very sly. That, he said, was Comrade Napoleon's cunning. He had seemed to oppose the windmill, simply as a manoeuvre to get rid of Snowball, who was a dangerous character and a bad influence. — George Orwell

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. — George Orwell

The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. — George Orwell

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

Inequality was the price of civilization. — George Orwell

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions and tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled 'good' or 'bad' ... By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. — George Orwell

"A minority of one" ... the definition of insanity. — George Orwell

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. — George Orwell

You understand, that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. — George Orwell

Writing a novel is agony. — George Orwell

Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don't use foreign expressions. It's elitist.) — Hilary Mantel

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. — George Orwell

Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever. — George Orwell

If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens. — George Orwell

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

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

Each day they expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy - enough to plough thousands of acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses - in mere, useless walking. — George Orwell

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing. — George Orwell

Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous. — George Orwell

Only child life is real life. — George Orwell

As apprehended by those — George Orwell

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

The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. — George Orwell

In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T.S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. — George Orwell

His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image. — George Orwell

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations. — George Orwell

Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them. — George Orwell

No one is patriotic about taxes. — George Orwell

No one I met at this time
doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients
failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all. — George Orwell

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? — George Orwell

He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so ... — George Orwell

The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand. — George Orwell

The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley; — David Mitchell

It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. — George Orwell

Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vice. — George Orwell

Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round. — George Orwell

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. — George Orwell

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. — George Orwell

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

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. — George Orwell

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

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

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. — George Orwell

World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible. — George Orwell

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time — George Orwell

Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.' 'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals - mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of. — George Orwell

Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed. — George Orwell

Had thought earlier in the night that you can't run when you are sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle and cartridges; I learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or a hundred armed men after you. — George Orwell

The [Victory Gin] was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. — George Orwell

The answer to 1984 is 1776 — Alex E. Jones

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. — George Orwell

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

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun. — George Orwell

Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers. — George Orwell

Myths which are believed in tend to become true. — George Orwell

Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer - except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs. — George Orwell

The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil. — George Orwell

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable" ... In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. 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. — George Orwell

So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern ... Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. — George Orwell

For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money. — George Orwell

Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. Now — George Orwell

The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice. Yet even Orwell did not dare to have it said that "Big Brother's" birth was attended by miraculous signs and portents - such as birds hailing the glorious event by singing in human words. — Christopher Hitchens

There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. — George Orwell

It was only a hopeless fantasy,
it passed like an april day,
but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred
they have stolen my heart away. — George Orwell

Socialism does mean justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped off it. — George Orwell

Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four. — George Orwell

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education. — George Orwell

Who denounced you?" said Winston. "It was my little daughter," said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. "She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway. — George Orwell

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not
money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And
though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries,
and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could
remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I
bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to
be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money
suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not
itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her
own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in
iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things ... And now
abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these
is money.
I Corinthians xiii (adapted) — George Orwell

By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell, — Alain De Botton

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. — George Orwell

Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On — George Orwell

Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. — George Orwell

We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. — George Orwell

Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', — George Orwell

first four letters, and used to write them out — George Orwell

Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. — George Orwell

Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock. — Frans De Waal

In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already — George Orwell

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. — George Orwell

Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at — George Orwell

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses. — George Orwell