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)
I have always been a rebel, and I always will be.
The best way to understand a country is to live in it and to work in it.
The only way to be truly free is to be able to think for yourself.
I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
The very word 'socialism' has been so debased that it is almost meaningless.
The great danger of our time is that we are losing the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood.
I am not a prophet, but I do believe that the future is going to be very different from the past.
The only hope for the future is to educate people to think for themselves.
The most important thing in life is to be kind to others.
I have always been drawn to the underdog.
The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do.
The true nature of a society is revealed in how it treats its weakest members.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
One of the most horrible things about war is that it makes the decent people long for peace, and the indecent people long for war.
If you set yourself to it, you can make yourself believe almost anything.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not all the time.
A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he's married.
The word 'socialism' has been so misused that it is almost meaningless.
The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
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 all along.
Contemporaries of George Orwell
Other Literatures born within 50 years of George Orwell (1903–1950).