The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
"Eric Arthur Blair", who used the pen name "George Orwell", was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.
Commonly ranked as one of the most influential 20th century English writers and chroniclers of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He is best known for the Utopian and dystopian fiction/dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). His non fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, are widely acclaimed, as are his Essays of George Orwell/essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous writers! More George Orwell on Wikipedia.At age 50, every man has the face he deserves.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
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.
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
Big Brother is watching you.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.
Words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
He who controls the past controls the future.
No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is a thing that human beings must avoid.
Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter.
They can make you say anything - ANYTHING - but they can't make you believe it.
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 spurting out ink.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
..nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been short lived where as adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.
Sanity is not statistical.
Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage have developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped.
By lack of understanding they remained insane.
When man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys.
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.
The future is a boot smashing a human face forever.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four. If granted, all else follows.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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