By George Orwell • Dystopian Political Literature
Orwell's prophetic warning against totalitarian surveillance, historical erasure, Newspeak, and the manipulation of objective truth.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”
“Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.”
“The Americans always go one better on any kind of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering or theosophy.”
“I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.”
“Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.”
“This means no more than vae victis - woe to the creed that is not backed by machine-guns!”
“As to a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc is P. S. Burton, but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Allways. I rather favour George Orwell.”
“Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.”
“Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching?”
“It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.”
“In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.”
“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”
“Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac.”
“The essential job is to get people to recognise war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.”
“One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.”
“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”
“Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?”
“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”
“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”
“Adults are only less superstitious than children in proportion as they have more power over their environment. In predicaments where everyone is powerless (eg war, gambling) everyone is superstitious”
“Mr Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.”