Orwellian Quotes & Sayings

Once again, the puppets on Capitol Hill are about to slam the Muppets on Main Street. The country still hasn't recovered from the Wall Street-induced financial cataclysm of 2008, yet Congress is preparing to enact the Orwellian 'JOBS Act' - a bill that should in fact be called the 'Return Fraud to Wall Street in One Easy Step Act.' — Eliot Spitzer

The Venus Project is neither Utopian nor Orwellian, nor does it reflect the dreams of impractical idealists. Instead, it presents attainable goals requiring only the intelligent application of what we already know. The only limitations are those which we impose upon ourselves. — Jacque Fresco

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. — George Orwell

The ... experts of the FDA have declared Laetrile to be worthless ... quackery and fraud ... These experts are the professional descendants of experts ... confident that mental illness should be cured by drilling holes in the skull, the better to let the demons out ... This is the Orwellian fashion in which the medical establishment throws its weight around ... — James J. Kilpatrick

It is not possible to redefine marriage. Marriage is the union between a man and a woman, has been historically, remains so. It is Alice in Wonderland territory, Orwellian almost, for any Government of any political persuasion to seek to come along and try to re-write the lexicon. It will not do. — Roger Gale

Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice, and democracy quaint, if not dangerous and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite, or eviscerated from public life. — Henry Giroux

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

As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated. — Charlton Heston

Your weakness - the weakness of your soft American life - is you think that all people are like you, that reason can explain everything in this world. You expect two plus two to equal four. But it doesn't. It equals whatever the powerful say it does. If they say it equals a hundred and eight, the mathematicians will prove it's so. --- (Milosa Kasparov) — Elisabeth Elo

Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it's one of the least 'brave' or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It's one thing to call it just, but to pretend it's 'brave' is Orwellian in the extreme. — Glenn Greenwald

The intellectual world is deeply conformist ... We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense. — Noam Chomsky

I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. — Glenn Greenwald

To set the stage for this discussion, it is necessary to explain that what is at work is an Orwellian strategy of rhetorical deception to represent finance and other rentier sectors as being part of the economy, not external to it. This is precisely the strategy that parasites in nature use to deceive their hosts that they are not free riders but part of the host's own body, deserving careful protection. — Michael Hudson

What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to entertain ourselves. — Neil Postman

I love America, but I've now got two young kids and America has changed so much since 9/11 and Bush. It's beyond Orwellian. The idea in '1984' that if you keep saying you're being attacked then you can get away with anything has come true. — James Marsh

It is the right of a free individual to be unhindered in their liberty!
Especially to fail in their endeavors!
Only in this manner are they truly free. — Keith Parfitt

1984 was alive and well in 2015. — Kenneth Eade

Our time prides itself on having finally achieved the freedom from censorship for which libertarians in all ages have struggled ... The credit for these great achievements is claimed by the new spirit of rationalism, a rationalism that, it is argued, has finally been able to tear from man's eyes the shrouds imposed by mystical thought, religion, and such powerful illusions as freedom and dignity. Science has given us this great victory over ignorance. But, on closer examination, this victory too can be seen as an Orwellian triumph of an even higher ignorance: what we have gained is a new conformism, which permits us to say anything that can be said in the functional languages of instrumental reason, but forbids us to allude to ... the living truth ... so we may discuss the very manufacture of life and its 'objective' manipulations, but we may not mention God, grace, or morality. — Joseph Weizenbaum

By the late 1990s, it was almost as if the Orwellian scenario of the Mac's "1984" commercial had come true. Big Business, with a pair of capital B's, ruled computing. The drones used what they were told. — Brent Schlender

I was still very much embroiled in the racist politics of the National Front, living a double-life in which I wrote hate-filled propaganda during the day and read the love-filled pages of Chesterton and Lewis at night. I was not aware of any contradiction, at least at first, and sought to bring the two warring viewpoints together by a process of Orwellian doublethink, which is defined in Nineteen Eighty-four as "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."1 Throughout the early to mid-eighties I became very adept at doublethink, endeavoring to squeeze the square peg of my Christian reading into the round hole of my racist ideology. As my knowledge of Christianity grew larger and my commitment to racial nationalism diminished in consequence, the strain of squeezing an ever larger peg into an ever-shrinking hole would eventually become impossible. My days of doublethink were numbered. — Joseph Pearce

CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance. — Heather Brooke

To be a liberal is to care about more than one's own belly or roof. It is to care about the rights of all men and women to live and breathe freely. Freely, do you hear me? This is not oppression. Stop saying that black is white and night is day. Freedom is not slavery! So stop with the Orwellian double talk and start working to help more than yourself. Lining your own pockets is the opposite of helping this world! — Robert Peate

We have entered an Orwellian era in which entitlement replaces responsibility, coercion is described as compassion, compulsory redistribution is called sharing, race quotas substitute for diversity, and suicide is prescribed as 'death with dignity.' Political discourse has become completely corrupted. The reason is that if you tell people directly that you want to raise their taxes, transfer their wealth, count them by skin color, or let doctors kill them, most will object. Statists know this and therefore are obliged to obfuscate. — Theodore J. Forstmann

The Orwellian vision was about state-sponsored surveillance. Now it's not just the state, it's your nosy neighbor, your ex-spouse and people who want to spam you. — Howard Rheingold

Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating the Seal Protection Act. — Karen Joy Fowler

The Internet is transient. Information can be removed with a couple of mouse-clicks; it is an Orwellian dream. We have been advised, by people who claim to know about these things, that there is no point in protesting against a social network. Whoever owns the network will run it as they see fit, normally to maximize their profit margin. Members who dispute the rules will simply be thrown out. The Terms of Use are written so as not to allow them any recourse. — G.R. Reader

Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak. — Erica Jong

Rather like "Orwellian", the term "Kafkaesque" has come to be used, often enough by those who have not read a word of Kafka, yo describe what are perceived as typically or even uniquely modern traumas:existential alienation, isolation and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal systems, the knock on the door in the middle of the night ... — Franz Kafka

However, this court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules - a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret. — Colleen McMahon

No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense. — Peter Slezak

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact
in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself
of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates. [ ... ] In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo. — David Foster Wallace

I believe strongly that we can protect our people without undermining our constitutional rights and I worry very, very much about the huge attacks on privacy that we have seen in recent years
both from the government and the private sector. I worry that we are moving toward an Orwellian society, and this is something I will oppose as vigorously as I can. — Bernie Sanders

Foretold by ancient seers and now by scientists, we are at the unprecedented historic and evolutionary crossroad. We have the capacity to transform ourselves spiritually and our civilisation materially or de-evolve into an Orwellian nightmare — Jonathan R. Banks

In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system,
non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor,
judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's
order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial. — William Safire

This is not some alarmist Orwellian scenario; it is here, now, financed by $20 billion last year and $15 billion more this year of federal money appropriated out of sheer fear. By creating the means to monitor 300 million visits to the United States yearly, this administration and a supine opposition are building a system capable of identifying, tracking and spying on 300 million Americans. — William Safire

The way I think liberties get eroded is not that all of a sudden you become an Orwellian state, but gradually it becomes harder for people with unpopular views to speak out without being in danger, be it from the state or just from the majority of the people who don't like them. — Rebecca MacKinnon

As I have already said, the belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous or all delusions. It becomes still more dangerous if it is coupled with the missionary zeal to enlighten the rest of the world, whether the rest of the world wishes to be enlightened or not. To refuse to embrace wholeheartedly a particular definition of reality, to dare to see the world differently can become a "think crime" in a truly Orwellian sense as we get steadily closer to 1984. — Paul Watzlawick

Our society has come to adopt many of the draconian measures Orwell
tried to warn us about. Cameras monitor citizens from nearly every street
corner in the United Kingdom, and there are a steadily growing number
of them mounted on traffic lights in America. The fact that Orwell's 1984
remains a part of the required reading curriculum in many high schools
across the country is laughably ironic. What is truly sad is how many readers
acknowledge the brilliant foresight of Orwell yet fail to grasp how closely
present-day America (and England) resemble Winston Smith's Oceania. — Donald Jeffries

Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere. — Bob Barr

Such is the control, and such the public mentality, enjoyed by the Swedish planners. The rulers of the Soviet Union, although favoured by despotic power, are not so fortunate. Obstructively resentful of officialdom, the Russian, in the words of the Spanish saying, has always known how orders are 'to be obeyed but not carried out'. To the Swede, that sort of compromise is downright immoral. His elected leaders have received those political blessings denied the autocrats in the Kremlin: compliant citizens and an unopposed bureaucracy. — Roland Huntford

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained. — Anne Lamott

In America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them. — Gerry Spence

His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word 'Orwellian' in two senses: The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammelled power; the second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think. — Christopher Hitchens

Natural gas has been sold as clean energy. But when the gas comes from fracturing bedrock with about five million gallons of toxic water per well, the word "clean" takes on a disturbingly Orwellian tone. Don't be fooled. Fracking for shale gas is in truth dirty energy. — Sean Lennon

I want to set the record straight."
"The record's never straight, you idiot! Haven't you ever read 1984? They rewrite the record anytime it doesn't suit them. You're spinning your wheels and exposing your bare fanny for nothing. — David Eddings

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes a burlesque. No — Neil Postman

They had taken see-no-evil and had made it their own by adopting a state sanctioned Orwellian see-no-evil policy — Jonathan Dunne

By popular definition, no one was less Orwellian than Eric Blair. — William Giraldi

The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes. — Helmut Newton

The last thing reporters and editors want to be told is what to do and how to write. They don't want to be some politically correct, Orwellian, kind of like "you're telling me how to write about ... ?" — Jose Antonio Vargas

ARE YOU ASKING ME WHAT THOUGHTS YOU SHOULD THINK?? What kind of Orwellian police state do you think I'm running here? Think whatever thoughts come into your thinking device, sir. (response to a reader asking what to keep in mind while reading Warm Bodies) — Isaac Marion

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace. — George W. Bush

They fought to smile through the lines and the mud and the long hours, dancing under the stars and under the watchful eyes of their government, an Orwellian backdrop for a Rockwellian world. — Denise Kiernan

If there is a main problem in American art today," says critic Tom Piazza, "it is not that we need the new to unshackle us from a suffocating and outmoded tradition. The new is constantly pumped out, by the ton and 24 hours a day, into the esthetic rivers, reservoirs and gullies of our culture, and nobody needs to go looking for it. With all the economic force of corporate profit and advertising behind it, pop culture, with its Billy the Kid ethos, has in fact become the new establishment. In a truly Orwellian irony, the new is the status quo."36 — James Bau Graves

It was Orwellian. I completely disappeared, and disappeared the same day. It was by early that evening when the Times story ran. That was an overreaction. All human beings under pressure behave poorly. — Gregg Easterbrook

The core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt. One constantly hears U.S. government defenders referring to 'terrorists' when what they actually mean is: those accused by the government of terrorism. — Glenn Greenwald

Testifying for Dr. Privitera ... To these 19 cancer victims, the enforcement of (California) Health and Safety Code Sect. 1701.1, the denial of them medical treatment, albeit unorthodox, albeit unapproved by a state agency, must surely take on a Kafka-esque, a nightmare quality. No demonstrated public anger, no compelling interest of the state warrants an Orwellian intrusion into the most private of zones of privacy. — Rose Bird

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. — Golda Meir

All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is, ... — Karl Rove

Clearly we must do everything we can to protect our country from the serious potential of another terrorist attack, but we can and must do so in a way that also protects the constitutional rights of the American people and maintains our free society. We can do that without living in an Orwellian world where the government and private corporations know every telephone call that we make, every website we visit, every place we go. — Bernie Sanders

In the Orwellian dystopia the original sin was thoughtcrime, but in our new corporate dystopia the secret inner crime is need, particularly financial need. People in America hide financial need like they hide sexual perversions.

Why? Because there's a direct correlation between need and rights. The more you need, the more you owe, the fewer rights you have.

Conversely, the less you need, the more you have, the more of a free citizen you get to be. On the extreme ends of this spectrum it is literally a crime to be poor, while a person with enough money literally cannot be prosecuted for certain kinds of crimes. — Matt Taibbi

Her Majesty's government is engaging not merely in Orwellian Newspeak but in self-defeating Orwellian Newspeak. The broader message it sends is that ours is a weak culture so unconfident and insecure that if you bomb us and kill us our first urge is to find a way to flatter and apologize to you. — Mark Steyn

Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing - a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming. — Terence McKenna

Hence, contrary to the conclusion arrived at by the public goods theorists, logic forces one to accept the result that only a pure market system can safeguard the rationality, from the point of view of the consumers, of a decision to produce a public good. And only under a pure capitalist order could it be ensured that the decision about how much of a public good to produce (provided it should be produced at all) would be rational as well. 17 No less than a semantic revolution of truly Orwellian dimensions would be required to come up with a different result. Only if one were willing to interpret someone's "no" as really meaning "yes," the "nonbuying of something" as meaning that it is really "preferred over that which the nonbuying person does instead of nonbuying," of "force" really meaning "freedom," of "noncontracting" really meaning "making a contract" and so on, could the public goods theorists' point be "proven. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe