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Time Quotes by George Orwell

168 Time quotes by George Orwell

All Time quotes George Orwell’s page

George Orwell paints a picture of a mind lost in a dark sea forest, where the past feels dead and the future seems impossible. He warns that when a lie is repeated by many, it can turn into history and truth. His quotes also mention how the loss of true science makes the world feel empty.

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The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

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We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

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For the future. For the unborn.

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“The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What”

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You were the dead; theirs was the future.

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“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time,”

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He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

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“Who controls the past controls the future.”

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“Most people want to be good, but not that good and not all the time.”

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“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

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“For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.”

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Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.”

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The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

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In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

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“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolucionary act.”

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How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a…

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“to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when…

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And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why…

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“Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from…

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The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the…

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The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

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“To prevent us from shooting each other in the darkness white armlets would be worn. At this moment a messenger arrived to…

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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides…

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“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue; and then, when we are…

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“The thing that strikes me more and more, is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t…

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“There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting -- I…

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Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their…

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It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body...…

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“Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the…

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“For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You…

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For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be…

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“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in…

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“There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling…

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“The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour…

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“What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is…

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“I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any…

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“How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the…

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“The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary…

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“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I…

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More by George Orwell

In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did…

It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was…

“The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running…

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the…

“if you took 1 Corinthians, chapter thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'charity', the chapter had ten times as much meaning…

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became…

“Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through…

“But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Whatever the Party holds to…

“And the people under the sky were also very much the same...everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just…

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally…

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to…

And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at…

“Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.…