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 greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
The purpose of life is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
The individual is a dying breed.
The most frightening thing about the future is that it will be exactly like the present, only more so.
The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.
The world is a raft sailing through space with, on board, a cargo of ignorant, naked apes.
The English are not a spiritual people, but they are a moral people.
The point of a joke is not to be understood, but to be felt.
The essential act of the totalitarian state is to make reality subjective.
The lower classes are always more patriotic than the upper classes.
The world is full of people who are not quite what they seem.
The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
To be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
The ordinary man is a decent fellow.
The more we are governed by strangers, the more we are likely to be misgoverned.
The best way to destroy a people is to deny their own understanding of their history.
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
Contemporaries of George Orwell
Other Literatures born within 50 years of George Orwell (1903–1950).