Authors — Quotes

George Orwell Quotes: 34

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
1984
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
1984
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
1984
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Animal Farm
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
1984
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with 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.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
1984
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.
Animal Farm
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
1984
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
1984
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
Politics and the English Language
Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
1984
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
Animal Farm
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
1984
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
1984
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.
Animal Farm
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
1984
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
1984
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
Why I Write
A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.
Down and Out in Paris and London
He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later:
A Collection of Essays
Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
1984
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
1984
At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.
1984