Best George Orwell Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Stop calling him 'George' ... His name's Eric!”

Sisters George Orwell 1984

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Desire Fear Brave New World Huxley George Orwell 1984 Orwell Aldous Huxley

Book:Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“I knew,' said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, 'that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.' For Orwell, this meant an ability to face not only that which troubles or disturbs us, but that which directly challenges our deepest convictions and assumptions: thus a power of facing. It is often the case, therefore, that to be 'in denial' is not only to commit an epistemological error, but also a moral one: a refusal or unwillingness to critically examine one’s own beliefs and value-judgments. "What the left needs, quite clearly, I think, is just such a 'power of facing.' Not only must it summon the nerve and courage to reconsider the idea that terrorism is a natural consequence of inequality and injustice; it must also acknowledge the equally disorienting fact that militant Islam is a foe with which compromise is not only undesirable, but axiomatically impossible. Even more decisively, it must attempt to fashion a less reductive and more dialectical understanding of American power and the world within which it operates. What it must materialize, in other words, is the antithesis of the fundamentalist world-view: a firm sense of reality and a certain openness of mind to face that which is deeply troubling.”

Honesty Integrity Islam George Orwell Islamism Left Wing Politics

Author:Simon Cottee

“A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.” This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. 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.”

Poverty Slavery Slave Socialism Working Class Utopia George Orwell Class Consciousness Down And Out In Paris And London Marcus Cato

Book:Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and Out in Paris and London

“In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)”

Writing Politics Poverty Economics Bourgeoisie George Orwell Tautology Edward Said

Author:Christopher Hitchens

“What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

School Deep Thoughts George Orwell Winston Smith O Brien

Author:George Orwell

“A world without men would hardly be a utopia. There'd still be some kind of hierarchy, that's inevitable. There'd still be one group trying to dominate everyone else, because that's human nature. There'd still be plenty of abused children. On the other hand, I can't quite picture Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever" on a female foot.”

Men Women Gender Domination Hierarchy George Orwell

Book:The Vulnerables

Source: The Vulnerables

“If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called ‘the spokesman of despair,’ and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience.”

Politics Despair Disillusionment Literary Criticism George Orwell George Gissing

Author:Raymond Williams

“As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, 'Some animals are more equal than others'—that he embedded in our language and in our minds. In Orwell's own mind there was an inextricable connection between language and truth, a conviction that by using plain and unambiguous words one could forbid oneself the comfort of certain falsehoods and delusions. Every time you hear a piece of psychobabble or propaganda—'people's princess,' say, or 'collateral damage,' or 'peace initiative'—it is good to have a well-thumbed collection of his essays nearby. His main enemy in discourse was euphemism, just as his main enemy in practice was the abuse of power, and (more important) the slavish willingness of people to submit to it.”

“Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while he was soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all—the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism.”

Europe Lies Fascism Colonialism 20th Century Imperialism Spain Nazism British Empire Stalinism George Orwell Intellectual Life Catalonia Spanish Civil War

Author:Christopher Hitchens

“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”

Source: For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

“He [Jonathan Swift] was a great man, and yet he was partially blind. He could only see one thing at a time. His vision of human society is so penetrating, and yet in the last analysis it's false. He couldn't see what the simplest person sees, that life is worth living and human beings, even if they're dirty and ridiculous, are mostly decent. But after all, if he could have seen that I suppose he couldn't have written Gulliver's Travels.”

Optimism Pessimism George Orwell Jonathan Swift

Book:Seeing Things As They Are: Selected Journalism and Other Writings

Source: Seeing Things As They Are: Selected Journalism and Other Writings

“If readers and writers are conscious of language, they will cease to be susceptible to corrupt political argument. Totalitarianism will lose its strength in the face of crisp, clear prose. It is a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of the English language. That Orwell was willing to assign language such power underscored his belief in the centrality of speech to politics, and the importance not only of securing free speech, but of ensuring that words that are spoken freely are also spoken honestly.”

Speech Free Speech Power Of Words Totalitarianism George Orwell Words Are Powerful

Book:Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century, Library Edition

Source: Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century, Library Edition

“He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.”

Madness Metaphysics Lunatic Epistemology George Orwell 1984 Minority Philosophy Of History Collective Solipsism Philophical Fiction

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt he had the right to,”

Relationship Right George Orwell 1984 Physical Necessity

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there.”

Literature Gardening Flowers Roses Life Worth Living George Orwell 1984 Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four Eric Blair

Book:Orwell's Roses

Source: Orwell's Roses

“No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.”

Language Common Sense Propaganda Critical Thinking Academia George Orwell

Author:Peter Slezak

“Depending on the contemporary mood, Orwell oscillates from Saint George to George the Seer to George the Sage. What other thinker has been both so fervidly claimed and derided by both the left and right? Who else except Kafka do we credit with having seen the sinister future? When the NSA spying scandal broke in June, Amazon sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four vaulted more than 6000 percent. The connection of Big Brother with the NSA might have been hysterical and spurious, but it was also testament to our sentimental, kneejerk affection for Orwell, to the fact that he remains the default scribe whenever our paranoia is fondled by the ominous machinations of realpolitik. The utter clarity and goodness of his intellect seem something of a miracle when one considers how many of his fellow writers botched the most pressing moral and political tests of their time. He could smell bullshit and blood a continent away: When a passel of leftist intellectuals was hailing the Soviet Union as humankind’s only hope, Orwell was persistent in pointing out that Stalin was a monocratic lunatic.”

Integrity Propaganda Totalitarianism Stalinism George Orwell Joseph Stalin Right Wing Politics Left Wing Politics National Security Agency

Author:William Giraldi

“About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread 1984: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror. Kafka's The Trial is also a book of terror, but it is a paradigm and to some extent a puzzle, so that one may lose oneself in the rhythm of the paradigm and play with the parts of the puzzle. Kafka's novel persuades us that life is inescapably hazardous and problematic, but the very 'universality' of this idea helps soften its impact: to apprehend the terrible on the plane of metaphysics is to lend it an almost soothing aura.”

Novel Metaphysics Paradigm Novels Literary Criticism George Orwell Kafka 1984 Orwell Franz Kafka The Trial

Book:Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four: Text, Sources, Criticism

Source: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four: Text, Sources, Criticism

“What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to entertain ourselves.”

America Politics Society Television Brave New World Huxley George Orwell 1984 Orwell Aldous Huxley

Author:Neil Postman

“Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...), is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party, and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following: The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States… And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.”

Film Criticism George Orwell Michael Moore Moral Equivalence Pacificism Farenheit 9 11

Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Nor have I any idea why Said should consider Orwell’s life a ‘comfortable’ one. Having taken a bullet through the throat, and while suffering from a demoralising and ultimately lethal case of TB, he lived on an astonishingly low budget and tried whenever possible to grow his own food and even to make his own furniture. Indeed, if there was anything affected about him, it might be his indifference to bourgeois life, his almost ostentatious austerity.”

Hardship Pretense Bourgeoisie Austerity George Orwell Edward Said Ascetism

Author:Christopher Hitchens

“#MOFA = Make Orwell Fiction Again”

Social Media Censorship Big Government George Orwell Utopianism Utopian Socialism

Author:A.E. Samaan

“I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

George Orwell Animal Farm

Book:Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers.”

George Orwell Animal Farm

Book:Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.”

Man George Orwell Animal Farm Animal Equality

Book:Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“...and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse–hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.”

George Orwell Animal Farm

Book:Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”

George Orwell Animal Farm

Book:Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

“All animals are equal.”

George Orwell Animal Farm

Author:George Orwell

“While everyone was worrying about the world turning into 1984 it turns out the world is actually Animal Farm.”

Political Propaganda George Orwell 1984 Orwell Animal Farm

Author:Johnny Moscato

“And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.’ This rather shallow piece appeared in the New York Times magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of Partisan Review, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, The Waste Land, Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The drift to the right, the rediscovery of patriotism, the gruesome maturity of the once iconoclastic Norman Podhoretz, okay, okay! I have one question which Atlas in his much-ballyhooed article did not even discuss. The old gang may have had regrettable flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged ‘neo-conservative’ movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary and the New Criterion can be found in unforced alliance with openly obscurantist, fundamentalist and above all anti-intellectual forces. In the old days, there would at least have been a debate on the proprieties of such a united front, with many fine distinctions made and brave attitudes struck. As I write, nearness to power seems the only excuse, and the subject is changed as soon it is raised. I wait for the agonised, self-justifying neo-conservative essay about necessary and contingent alliances. Do I linger in vain?”

Source: Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“He opposed the capitalist imperial order, but he remained at heart a traditionalist, imbued with the patriotic values of his childhood and implacably wedded to a patriarchal view of society.”

George Orwell Traditional Values Traditionalism Traditionalist

Book:Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century, Library Edition

Source: Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century, Library Edition

“The Eric Blair who finished Eton in 1921 was a naive young snob, with little knowledge of the world beyond the confines of the British middle class. His experiences in Burma, in Paris’s Latin Quarter, among England’s destitute in London and Wigan, and particularly in Catalonia developed his social conscience and honed his commitment to the twin ideals of liberty and social justice with which he remains indelibly associated.”

Liberty Social Justice Burma George Orwell Social Conscience Eric Blair

Book:Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century, Library Edition

Source: Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-first Century, Library Edition

“Rand, Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury foresaw much of today’s dystopian world: its spiritual and moral emptiness, its culture of consumerism, its flat-souled Last Manishness, its debasement of language, its doublethink, its illiteracy, and its bovine tolerance of authoritarian indignities. But they did not foresee the most serious and catastrophic of today’s problems: the eminent destruction of whites, and western culture. None of them thought to deal with race at all. Why is this? Probably for the simple reason that it never occurred to any of them that whites might take slave morality so far as to actually will their own destruction. As always, the truth is stranger than fiction.”

Dystopian Dystopia George Orwell 1984 Ray Bradbury Ayn Rand White Genocide Aldous Huxley Doublethink The Last Man Slave Morality

Author:Jef Costello

“In his entire output, I can find only one piece of genuine unfairness: a thuggish attack on the poetry of WH Auden, whom he regarded as a dupe of the Communist Party. But even this was softened in some later essays. The truth is that he disliked Auden's homosexuality, and could not get over his prejudice. But much of the interest of Orwell lies in the fact that he was born prejudiced, so to speak, against Jews and the coloured peoples of the empire, and against the poor and uneducated, and against women and intellectuals—and managed, in a transparent and unique way, to educate himself out of this fog of bigotry (though he never did get over his aversion to 'pansies').”

Education Racism Prejudice Bigotry Homosexuality Imperialism Homophobia George Orwell Intellectual Life

Author:Christopher Hitchens

“What Orwell failed to predict is that we'd buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.”

George Orwell 1984 Surveillance State

Author:Keith Lowell Jensen

“There is an almost invisible world out there which most people have been unable to see. And that is how the world is run, because nearly all our leaders, our judges, our top police officers, and our celebrities are members of the Jesuit Freemasons, or another of a dozen or so secret societies which control the world. They have sworn allegiance to these groups, and are to a certain degree owned by them, and only answer to them, not the sovereign citizens. In fact, their one and only agenda is to bring in the New World Order, an enslaved population under a one world government and army. This plan was forged ten years or so after the first of May 1776 when the Illuminati were formed in Bavaria, Germany. Now you know the real reason why Communist countries celebrate the first of May. One thing the cult do is to show you in plain sight their plans. In this regard you will struggle to find a historical English author who was not in some way connected to the Freemasons. This includes the so called “predictors” such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Just like the Simpsons today, they were not predicting but showing. H G Wells himself published the book The New World Order in 1940. He was also a member of the Fabian Society (as is Tony Blair). Wells also made a film in 1936 called Things to Come, in which the main character describes the New World Order as “The brotherhood of efficiency. The freemasonry of science.” And of the course the motto of the Freemasons is ordo ab chao, which means order out of chaos. Anyone wishing to research this matter further should start with the brilliant 1967 speech and warning of Myron Fagan.”

George Orwell Illuminati Freemasons Aldous Huxley H G Wells The Simpsons Myron Fagan Ordo Ab Chao The New World Order Un Agenda 2030

Author:Jack Freestone

“Si quedaba alguna esperanza, debía estar en los proles, porque solo en esas masas despreciadas, que constituían el ochenta y cinco por ciento de la población de Oceanía, podía generarse la fuerza necesaria para destruir al Partido. Este no podía derrocarse desde dentro. Sus enemigos, si es que los había, no tenían forma de unirse o siquiera de reconocerse mutuamente. Incluso en caso de que existiera la legendaria Hermandad —lo cual no era del todo imposible— resultaba inconcebible que sus miembros pudieran reunirse en grupos de más de dos o tres. La rebelión se limitaba a un cruce de miradas, una inflexión de la voz o, como mucho, una palabra susurrada ocasionalmente. En cambio los proles, si pudieran ser conscientes de su fuerza, no tendrían necesidad de conspirar. Bastaría con que se encabritaran como un caballo que se sacude las moscas. Si quisieran, podrían volar el Partido en pedazos a la mañana siguiente. Tarde o temprano tenía que ocurrírseles. Y sin embargo…”

Español Spanish George Orwell 1984 Orwell Winston Smith

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“El pasado había sido borrado, se había olvidado que había sido borrado y de ese modo la mentira se convertía en verdad”

Español Spanish George Orwell 1984 Orwell Winston Smith

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“La Lotería, con su reparto semanal de enormes premios, era el único acontecimiento público al que los proles prestaban verdadera atención. Era probable que hubiese millones de proles para quienes la Lotería fuese la razón principal, si no la única, para seguir con vida. Era su deleite, su locura, su analgésico, su estimulante intelectual. En lo que se refería a la Lotería, hasta quienes apenas sabían leer y escribir eran capaces de llevar a cabo intrincados cálculos y sorprendentes logros memorísticos. Había toda una tribu de individuos que se ganaban la vida vendiendo sistemas, predicciones y amuletos de la suerte. Winston no tenía nada que ver con la Lotería, que se gestionaba desde el Ministerio de la Abundancia, pero sabía (como cualquier otro miembro del Partido) que los premios eran casi todos imaginarios. Solo se pagaban pequeñas sumas y los ganadores de los premios gordos en realidad no existían. En ausencia de verdadera comunicación entre una parte de Oceanía y otra, no resultaba difícil amañarlo.”

Español Spanish George Orwell Orwell Winston Smith Lotería

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“En cierto sentido, la visión del mundo que tenía el Partido se imponía con éxito a gente incapaz de entenderla. Se les podía convencer de que aceptaran las más flagrantes violaciones de la realidad, porque nunca llegaban a entender del todo la enormidad de lo que se les pedía, y no estaban lo bastante interesados en los acontecimientos públicos para reparar en lo que ocurría. Su falta de comprensión les permitía conservar la cordura. Se limitaban a tragárselo todo y nunca se les indigestaba porque lo que tragaban no dejaba ningún residuo, igual que un grano de trigo puede pasar por el cuerpo de un pájaro sin ser digerido.”

Español Spanish George Orwell 1984 Orwell Winston Smith

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“Formar parte de la minoría, aunque fuese una minoría de uno solo, no te convertía en loco. Había la verdad y la mentira, y aferrarse a la verdad, aunque fuese en contra del mundo entero, no era sinónimo de estar loco.”

Español Spanish George Orwell 1984 Orwell Winston Smith Emmanuel Goldstein

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“Nunca, por nada en el mundo, podía uno desear que su dolor aumentara. Del dolor solo puede desearse una cosa: que cese. No hay nada peor que el dolor físico. Ante el dolor no hay héroes.”

Español Spanish George Orwell 1984 Orwell Winston Smith

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“Los mejores libros, comprendió, son los que te cuentan lo que ya sabías”

George Orwell 1984 Big Brother Winston Smith Hermano Mayor

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“Quien controla el pasado, controla el futuro. Quien controla el presente, controla el pasado (Cap 3, primera parte - 1984)”

Control Español Futuro Pasado George Orwell 1984 Orwell Distopia En Español

Author:George Orwell

“It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of the 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 1984 Page 72 Page 71

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“To think what the Stasi went through to spy on us. Even they couldn't dream of a world in which citizens voluntarily carried tracking devices, conducted self-surveillance and reported on themselves, morning, noon and night.”

Youtube Twitter Facebook George Orwell 1984 Stasi Erich Mielke Hans Backer Hohenschonhausen Prison

Book:Fortune Smiles

Source: Fortune Smiles

“When the first news of the Nazi camps was published in 1945, there were those who thought the facts might be exaggerated either by Allied war propaganda or by the human tendency to relish 'atrocity stories.' In his column in the London magazine Tribune, George Orwell wrote that, though this might be so, the speculation was not exactly occurring in a vacuum. If you remember what the Nazis did to the Jews before the war, he said, it isn't that difficult to imagine what they might do to them during one. In one sense, the argument over 'Holocaust denial' ends right there. The National Socialist Party seized power in 1933, proclaiming as its theoretical and organising principle the proposition that the Jews were responsible for all the world's ills, from capitalist profiteering to subversive Bolshevism. By means of oppressive legislation, they began to make all of Germany Judenrein, or 'Jew-free.' Jewish businesses were first boycotted and then confiscated. Jewish places of worship were first vandalised and then closed. Wherever Nazi power could be extended—to the Rhineland, to Austria and to Sudeten Czechoslovakia—this pattern of cruelty and bigotry was repeated. (And, noticed by few, the state killing of the mentally and physically 'unfit,' whether Jewish or 'Aryan,' was tentatively inaugurated.) After the war broke out, Hitler was able to install puppet governments or occupation regimes in numerous countries, each of which was compelled to pass its own version of the anti-Semitic 'Nuremberg Laws.' Most ominous of all—and this in plain sight and on camera, and in full view of the neighbours—Jewish populations as distant as Salonika were rounded up and put on trains, to be deported to the eastern provinces of conquered Poland. None of this is, even in the remotest sense of the word, 'deniable.”

Germany World War Ii Holocaust Nazism Nazi Germany Antisemitism George Orwell Adolf Hitler Holocaust Denial Jewry

Book:Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overriped turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?”

George Orwell 1984 Page 219

Book:1984

Source: 1984

“In his book The Captive Mind, written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another. Milosz had seen the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe from the inside, as a cultural official. He wrote, of his fellow-sufferers: A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life. Only one or two years after Orwell’s death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.”

Russia Communism Censorship Totalitarianism George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four Czeslaw Milosz

Author:Christopher Hitchens