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)
The only way to keep a secret is to tell it to no one.
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
The people who have the power are not the ones who are going to change the world.
The world is a raft, and we are all in the same boat.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
The only good human being is a dead one.
The common people are not to be trusted.
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.
The point is that we are all in the same boat, and we are all going to the same place.
The mass of the people are not interested in politics.
The English are not a spiritual people.
A man who is not interested in politics is a man who is not interested in life.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
The world is a series of related events, not a series of isolated ones.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is prepared to enter into a relationship where one is not perfect and to be loved as an imperfect being.
The great danger of the modern world is that we are losing the power of individual thought.
Freedom is the right to say no.
The very concept of good and evil is a human construct.
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
The true nature of man is to be free.
Contemporaries of George Orwell
Other Literatures born within 50 years of George Orwell (1903–1950).