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Politics Quotes by George Orwell

81 Politics quotes by George Orwell

All Politics quotes George Orwell’s page

George Orwell warns that those in power can rewrite history, rename streets, and repaint pictures to control what people think. He says the meaning of a word should guide the word, not the other way around. He also points out that even under a dictatorial regime, true inner freedom is hard to keep.

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Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

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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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“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices”

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

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The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men

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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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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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I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and…

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In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or…

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“The more one is aware of political bias the more one can be independent of it & the more one claims to…

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“To dislike a writer’s politics is one thing. To dislike him because he forces you to think is another, not necessarily incompatible…

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“Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness – on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed.”

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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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“Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for…

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If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which…

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“If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals... all equal... the strong…

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Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of…

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“What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms…

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“It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity…

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“It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity…

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“They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which…

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“It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism…

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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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“There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity…

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“Pacifism is a psychological curiosity rather than a political movement. Some of the extremer pacifists, starting out with a complete renunciation of…

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“The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her…

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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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“Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above…

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

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“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long…

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“purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government. The”

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A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.

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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 fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside

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

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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.…