George Orwell Quotes

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

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

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

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

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

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

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

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.

Free speech is my right to say what you don't want to hear.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

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

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

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.

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me--

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

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

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree.

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

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

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.