George Orwell Quotes

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

 

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

It’s frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

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.

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

 

In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

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.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.