Inspirational Quotes by George Orwell (English Novelist, Essayist, Journalist)

Inspirational Quotations by George Orwell (English Novelist, Essayist, Journalist)

Eric Arthur Blair (1903–50,) known by his pseudonym George Orwell, was a British novelist and essayist who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949.)

Born in Motihari in colonial India, Orwell, the son of a British colonial civil servant, was educated in England. After graduating from Eton College, Orwell joined the police administration in British India but resigned to become a writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris and took menial jobs; he described his experiences in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933.)

Orwell was an anarchist in the late 1920s and a socialist by the 1930s. When he traveled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against General Franco’s Nationalists in 1936, he fled from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The incident turned him into a lifetime anti-Stalinist.

At the onset of World War II, Orwell worked for the BBC on war propaganda, and in 1943, became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By then, he had established himself as a prolific journalist and wrote articles, reviews, and books.

Orwell’s work is characterized by his concern for social injustice. His most famous works include Animal Farm, a political fable set in a farmyard, but a satire on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian description of a future state in which every aspect of life is controlled by a totalitarian figure called Big Brother whose central party’s slogans are “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Originally titled The Last Man in Europe, Nineteen Eighty-Four brought to widespread use such phrases as “Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,” and “doublethink.”

As he was finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s health was worsening, and he died of tuberculosis in 1950.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Orwell

For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.
—George Orwell
Topics: Acceptance

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
—George Orwell
Topics: Education, School

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
—George Orwell
Topics: Language

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
—George Orwell
Topics: Sports

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.
—George Orwell
Topics: Rationality

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
—George Orwell
Topics: Progress

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
—George Orwell
Topics: Oppression

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
—George Orwell
Topics: Society

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics, a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage, surely that proves that you are in the right?
—George Orwell
Topics: Belief

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.
—George Orwell
Topics: Future

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
—George Orwell
Topics: Freedom

A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself… What am I trying to say? What words will express it?…And he probably asks himself… Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you
—George Orwell
Topics: Authors & Writing

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
—George Orwell
Topics: Nation, Nationality, Nationalities, Nationalism

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
—George Orwell

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
—George Orwell
Topics: Madness, Defects

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
—George Orwell
Topics: Truth

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).
—George Orwell
Topics: Atheism, Religion

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.
—George Orwell
Topics: Censorship

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

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
—George Orwell
Topics: Candor, Feelings, Sincerity

A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
—George Orwell
Topics: Liberalism

History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
—George Orwell
Topics: History

One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.
—George Orwell
Topics: Kindness

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
—George Orwell
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
—George Orwell
Topics: Love

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.
—George Orwell
Topics: Revolution, Revolutionaries, Revolutions

In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act
—George Orwell
Topics: Activism

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded
—George Orwell
Topics: Jokes

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
—George Orwell
Topics: Animals, Equality

Mr Wells
—George Orwell
Topics: Authors & Writing