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Political Quotes by George Orwell

41 Political quotes by George Orwell

All Political quotes George Orwell’s page

George Orwell warns that repeated lies can become accepted as truth. He explains how special language called Newspeak tries to shrink what people can think about, making false ideas sound real. He also points out that politics is full of deception and that being aware of bias helps keep one's thinking clear.

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“In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues…”

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The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.

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You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.

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

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“It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All”

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The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

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To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

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The typical socialist... a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings.

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Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the…

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[Political] prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked…

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[T]he more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and…

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In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is…

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Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that…

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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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Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by…

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Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

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Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It…

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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of…

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“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in…

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Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated…

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But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group…

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Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become…

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To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs,…

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“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in…

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A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The…

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“A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a…

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A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today

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“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

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Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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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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“Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure…

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“Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make…

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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…

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It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning…

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But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear…

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Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is…

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“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And…

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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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Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’…

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It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession…

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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.…