Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes 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

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
—George Orwell
Topics: School, Education

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
—George Orwell
Topics: Happiness

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 squirting our ink.
—George Orwell
Topics: Aptness, Appropriateness, Language

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
—George Orwell
Topics: Politicians, Defense, Politics

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
—George Orwell
Topics: Intelligence

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
—George Orwell
Topics: Language

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
—George Orwell
Topics: Equality

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
—George Orwell
Topics: War

Throughout recorded time… there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.
—George Orwell
Topics: Class

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
—George Orwell
Topics: Youth

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.
—George Orwell
Topics: Tyranny, Power

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
—George Orwell
Topics: News, Media

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

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

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

For a creative writer possession of the “truth” is less important than emotional sincerity.
—George Orwell
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing

Mr Wells
—George Orwell
Topics: Authors & Writing

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

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

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
—George Orwell
Topics: War, Beginning

You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm.
—George Orwell
Topics: Security

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
—George Orwell
Topics: Maturity

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
—George Orwell
Topics: Responsibility

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism
—George Orwell
Topics: Patriotism

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
—George Orwell
Topics: Defeat

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
—George Orwell
Topics: Eating, Food, Weapon

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

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
—George Orwell
Topics: Survival, Fighting

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

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

One response to “Inspirational Quotes by George Orwell (English Novelist, Essayist, Journalist)”

  1. Inspirational quotes from George Orwell – Myflowersshops.com

    […] 1 ” Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. —George Orwell” […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *