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Past Quotes by George Orwell

39 Past quotes by George Orwell

All Past quotes George Orwell’s page

George Orwell describes a past that can be rewritten by those in power, turning lies into accepted truth. He notes that the loss of scientific language makes thinking harder. He warns that whoever controls the past also controls the future and the present.

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

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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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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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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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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…

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.…