History Quotes by George Orwell

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

— George Orwell

“It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was…

— George Orwell

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

— George Orwell

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

— George Orwell

“If all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

— George Orwell

“tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls”

— George Orwell

“Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again”

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the…

— George Orwell

“The essential point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is just this, the danger of the ultimate and absolute power which mind can develop when…

— George Orwell

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that…

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

“One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names…

— George Orwell

England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the…

— George Orwell

“If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand…

— George Orwell

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that…

— George Orwell

As Gove knows… 'Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils…

— George Orwell

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building…

— George Orwell

“The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than…

— George Orwell

“These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their…

— George Orwell

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been re-painted, every statue and street and…

— George Orwell

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of…

— George Orwell

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by…

— George Orwell

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been…

— George Orwell

All progressive thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain ... Hitler, because in…

— George Orwell

“Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified,…

— George Orwell

“The history books say that life before the Revolution was completely different from what it is now. There was the most terrible…

— George Orwell

“When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization…

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell

History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.

— George Orwell

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

— George Orwell

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

— George Orwell

“Perhaps when the next Great War comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in…

— George Orwell

We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to…

— George Orwell

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

— George Orwell

... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

— George Orwell

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

— George Orwell

Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.

— George Orwell

“Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that…

— George Orwell