Skip to content

History Quotes by George Orwell

39 History quotes by George Orwell

All History quotes George Orwell’s page

A cracked record shows how history can be rewritten and turned into false truth. The quotes explain that when a group controls the stories, lies can become accepted as real. They also warn that the idea of objective truth is disappearing when records are altered.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

Other authors on History

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.…