George Orwell
1984, Animal Farm, champion of political clarity
Most quoted
"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?"
— from Animal Farm, 1945
"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."
— from Politics and the English Language, 1946
"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."
— from Politics and the English Language, 1946
All quotes by George Orwell (198)
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The common people are not in the least interested in the high politics of the moment.
The best books are those that tell you what you know already.
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
The point is that 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.
Contemporaries of George Orwell
Other Literatures born within 50 years of George Orwell (1903–1950).