George Orwell quotes
GEORGE Orwell is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), a widely quoted English novelist, journalist and essayist. Apart from the sharp observations and clear prose of his essays, his novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (which I studied in SVHS) are among the most influential novels of the 20th century.
Some writers have such distinctive styles or ways of depicting the world that those attributes have earned them recognition in words like “Shakespearean”, “Dickensian”, “Chaucerian”. Orwell has joined that group with some of his quotes: such terms as “alternative facts” are clearly Orwellian. Some words he coined, like “doublespeak” and “thoughtcrime”, have now become part of the English language.
Here is a selection of some of his memorable and significant quotes:
■ “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
■ “No one can get up much enthusiasm for a Government which puts you in jail if you open your mouth.”
■ “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”
■ “You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.”
■ “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”
■ “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.”
■ “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
■ “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.”
■ “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.”
■ “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
■ “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
■ “Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth.”
■ “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
■ “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
ARVIND MANI
Nadi