Quotes by
George Orwell |
1903-1950 , British writer
English 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. | 34 quotes | 6,770 visits |
Quotations
| • | A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices. 81 |
| • | In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. 19 |
| • | Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. 16 |
| • | Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. 14 |
| • | Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. 13 |
| • | The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. 13 |
| • | All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. 11 |
| • | If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. 8 |
| • | 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. 7 |
| • | One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. 7 |
| • | At 50, everyone has the face he deserves. 6 |
| • | He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing. 6 |
| • | He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. 6 |
| • | It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (first phrase of “1984”) 6 |
| • | Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. 6 |
| • | As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. 5 |
| • | If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, for ever. 5 |
| • | One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army. 5 |
| • | Power is not a means; it is an end. 5 |
| • | 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. 5 |
| • | Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. 5 |
| • | 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. 4 |
| • | 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. 4 |
| • | 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) 4 |
| • | 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) 4 |
| • | A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. 3 |
| • | England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. 3 |
| • | 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. 3 |
| • | The most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is “bastard”, which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all. 3 |
| • | 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. 2 |
| • | Big Brother is Watching You. 2 |
| • | If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones. 2 |
| • | 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. 2 |
| • | 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. 2 |
