Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterized by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. This George Orwell quotes on truth, communism, politics, freedom, war will motivate you.
Best George Orwell Quotes
- “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ~ George Orwell
- “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ~ George Orwell
- “All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” ~ George Orwell
- “The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.” ~ George Orwell
- “In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ~ George Orwell, George Orwell quotes on truth
- “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” ~ George Orwell
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“It’s frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.” ~ George Orwell
- “However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
- “Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.” ~ George Orwell
- “That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer’s cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” ~ George Orwell
- “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” ~ George Orwell
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“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ~ George Orwell
- “It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.” ~ George Orwell
- “So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” ~ George Orwell
- “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” ~ George Orwell
- “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
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“All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
- “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” ~ George Orwell
- “If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
- “True freedom is the right to say something that others don’t want to hear.” ~ George Orwell
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“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” ~ George Orwell
- “War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.” ~ George Orwell
- “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” ~ George Orwell
- “Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” ~ George Orwell
- “The upper-class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.” ~ George Orwell
- “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.” ~ George Orwell
- “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 the 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.” ~ George Orwell
- “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.” ~ George Orwell
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“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
- “The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now, do you begin to understand me?” ~ George Orwell
- “It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.” ~ George Orwell
- “Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.” ~ George Orwell
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“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.” ~ George Orwell
- “Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose” ~ George Orwell
- “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.” ~ George Orwell Quotes
- “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than of stealing from a poor box.” ~ George Orwell
- “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” ~ George Orwell
