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George Orwell

1903-1950 ,  British writer
George OrwellEnglish novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm< (1945) and 1984 (1949), the latter a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.

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Quotations

A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices.

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe 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.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.

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

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

(first phrase of “1984”)


Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, for ever.

One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

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.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.

It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.

(from “Homage to Catalonia”, 1938)


We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

(letter to “The Tribune” , 20 December 1940)


A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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

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.

The most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is “bastard”, which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

Big Brother is Watching You.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.


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