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Famous George Orwell Quotes

“In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.”

ThinkingWayHumansReasonLawCertainIndividualHuman BeingsAnimalOpinionTheoryAmountPressureBehaveUrgesConformityBehaviourPublic OpinionCompulsionPractiseEccentricityArbiterGregarious
Book:All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
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“As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool - and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.”

ThinkingWorldIdeasWarAbleTreeSeaModernQuietSittingRiversFishesRadioBoatLakesFishingPoolModern WorldAeroplanesWillow Trees
Book:Coming Up for Air
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“Some people have a knack, for example, of being able to tell when someone's lying to them. They may not know what the truth is, but they can tell when someone is trying to lead them astray or sell them something shady. I think he had that ability to an amazing degree. I also think he thought, without saying it explicitly, that you can convince a crowd of something that's not true more easily than you can one person at a time.”

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Author:George Orwell
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“Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise.”

IfsThinkingShouldMindSeemsAtheismHabitOrdinaryPositive AtheismSurfaceCreedsAnarchismBulliedRenunciationPacifismHabits Of MindDirtiness
Book:All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
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“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”

ThinkingMenTryingWould BeWantedMovingCertainHumanityCoursesLinesPerfectImagineProduceHe ManPerfectionStrategyCreatorValuableEndlessEmptinessTemporaryProphecyUtopiaContinuationToothachePerfect Society
Book:The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944
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“Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional [or scholarly] writers.”

IfsThinkingFirstsPoliticalFightingStepsWrittenTroubleModernWillingHabitConcernSpreadFirst StepsImitationExclusiveAvoidedBad HabitsFrivolousRegenerationScholarlyModern English
Book:A Collection of Essays
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“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.”

PeopleThinkingIdeasMomentsBodyGivenAcceptingOrthodoxyFreedom Of The Press
Book:Orwell and politics: Animal farm in the context of essays, reviews and letters selected from the complete works of George Orwell
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“In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and incovenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of iedas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.”

PeopleThinkingNeedsIdeasCountryMomentsFactsBodyFacesGivenDarkAcceptingEnemyWorstIntellectualJournalistOfficialsCowardiceOrthodoxyBansWorst Enemy
Author:George Orwell
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“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. 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.”

PeopleThinkingWayYearsHas BeensFactsPastPoliticalPoliticsWishFutureObviousThriveIgnoredYour FutureMy FutureUnwelcomeForeseeingPolitical ThinkingYears Past
Book:The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944
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“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

PeopleThinkingWorldWellsHeartPoliticalLyingPoliticsExistenceMillionsSkyWallOne DayHatredIgnorantCuriousMusclesBelly
Book:Nineteen Eighty-Four
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“I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.”

IfsThinkingPersonsCoursesNextFeltWalksCitiesImagineImpossibleDoorsIllusionCrowdsStrangerAwakeImagine That
Book:The Penguin complete novels of George Orwell
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“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. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

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Book:Shooting an Elephant: And Other Essays
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“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”

IfsThinkingHumansLongDoneRunningHuman BeingsPovertySecurityIgnoranceMassFunctionBasesEnjoyedMinoritiesRealisingLeisureLong RunsSooner Or LaterPrivilegedIgnorance In 19841984 Important
Book:Animal Farm and 1984
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“The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.”

ThinkingMenDoeBookFactsHouseDifferencesPoorLibertyRichShapesMassSmartMachinesInjusticeEnormousSettingEducatedSettingsBoredomHotelRich And PoorRich ManSweepingHordeTreadmillsEducated Man
Book:Down and Out in Paris and London
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“The mistake you make, don't you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.”

IfsThinkingWayTryingMistakeEconomicAchieveOneselfCornersHolesMaking MoneyBehaveEconomic SystemsCorrupt Society
Author:George Orwell
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“I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”

ThinkingWorldChildrenPersonsFactsStoriesFeelingsFeltMy OwnHabitConversationAmbitionLonelyEverydayIsolatedImaginaryEveryday LifeFacilityMaking UpUndervaluedLonely Child
Book:A Collection of Essays
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“The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.”

ThinkingChildrenRealReasonHappensAgeLife IsAliveGrowingYouthImportanceReal LifeMysteriousThirtyStayingCalamityGrowing OldStaying AliveObsceneOnly ChildFussing
Book:The Collected Non-Fiction
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“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.”

PeopleThinkingWorldFacesFightingThreeNationsPerfectPartyMillionsHugeTerribleWeaponsHundredIdealsMachinesUnityWarriorConcreteSteelSlogansFanaticsMonstrousShouting1984 ImportantThinking The SameSame FaceMarching Forward
Book:1984
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“I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.”

ThinkingWritingMatterAgeAttitudeKnowingSubjectsEmotionalDevelopmentDeterminedMotiveSubject MatterKnowing Something
Book:A Collection of Essays
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“Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

IfsThinkingWritingChildrenSelfTogetherPoliticalLanguageResultsPiecesPhrasesOur TimeOrthodoxCensorshipVigorousSelf CensorshipPolitical Writing
Book:The complete works of George Orwell
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“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.”

PeopleThinkingGivingHumansTwoWarWholeProblemEarthHuman BeingsPartyMillionsPossibilityHundredConcernedAimIndependentSolveSurfaceConquerSecondsWarningIndependent Thought
Book:The Penguin complete novels of George Orwell
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“No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”

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Book:Homage to Catalonia / Down and Out in Paris and London
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“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.”

ThinkingMindBelieveHumansSelfRealityIndividualMistakeCasesAssumingObjectivesMaking MistakesCollectivesImmortalHuman MindEvident
Book:1984
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“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.”

PeopleThinkingIdeasDoneMomentsBodyBeliefGivenChallengesAcceptingOpinionFairsPressesHearingSurprisingForbiddenEffectivenessOrthodoxyBrowsPrevailingFreedom Of The Press
Author:George Orwell
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“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.”

ThinkingYearsBookMomentsFactsRealityPastStuffSoundHoursChanceHappenedTenYears AgoSightTwentiesSmellCuriousHistory Books
Book:The Penguin complete novels of George Orwell
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“Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers.”

ThinkingStoriesCareReadingWaitingHoursAddNewspapersDirtyBusRidingFractionsRailwayShavingJunctionSwapping
Book:Coming Up for Air
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“Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so. And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.”

ThinkingWayWantGivingMeanPersonsSaidSometimesMightHappensCareSufferingFearReadyTricksSavingDamnSave YourselfDon't Give A Damn
Author:George Orwell
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