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

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
—George Orwell
Topics: Criticism, Critics

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life…
—George Orwell
Topics: Reading

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

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
—George Orwell
Topics: Jokes

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
—George Orwell

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

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

Mr Wells.
—George Orwell
Topics: Authors & Writing

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

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

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

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

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

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
—George Orwell
Topics: Civilization

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

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
—George Orwell
Topics: Wishes, Politics

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
—George Orwell
Topics: Freedom

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

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
—George Orwell
Topics: Class

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.
—George Orwell
Topics: Politics

To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.
—George Orwell
Topics: Goals, Common Sense

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

WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
—George Orwell

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

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

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
—George Orwell
Topics: Advertising

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

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

Sanity is not statistical.
—George Orwell
Topics: Sanity

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  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” […]

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