orwell & 1984 quotes

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (Quotes from the novel)

George Orwell Quotes

Text Box: Those who control the present control the future. Those who control the future control the past. (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the indivdual human being.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two make four. If this is granted everything else follows. (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever. (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Down with Big Brother. (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

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

Text Box: I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

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.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

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.

And I believe that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph again.

Sanity is not statistical. (Nineteen Eighty-Four) Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

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

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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 spurting out ink.

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

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1984

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