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Past Quotes by George Orwell

39 Past quotes by George Orwell

All Past quotes George Orwell’s page

George Orwell’s eye for how yesterday shapes today never missed a beat, and these thirty‑nine quotes reveal his keen sense of history’s power to shape societies. From cautionary notes to stark realism, each line feels like a warning and a reminder.

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

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

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“Who controls the past controls the future.”

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

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

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If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what…

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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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He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

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The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.

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The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

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To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and…

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A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought…

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For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that…

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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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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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Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you…

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Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and…

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

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Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that…

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He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the…

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“Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look…

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The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive…

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A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different…

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Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its…

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“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened —that, surely,…

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It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of…

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“Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is…

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In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word…

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The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon--Gordon Comstock, last member of…

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

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

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

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In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been…

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

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The men who were well enough to stand had moved across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A…

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

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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…

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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…

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

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

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

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Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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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…

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

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

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“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…

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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…

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

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

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

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

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