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Thinking Quotes by George Orwell

46 Thinking quotes by George Orwell

All Thinking quotes George Orwell’s page

Sanity was statistical, meaning normalcy is measured by how many people think the same way. Orwell notes that clichés can build sentences for us and even shape our thoughts. He also observes that society often forces thinkers to repeat the obvious as a duty.

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Using clichés is a substitute for thinking

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Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.

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“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

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At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept…

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If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.

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It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

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Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.

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The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.

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We have sunk so low it has become the obligation of every decent, thinking individual to re-state the obvious!

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Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

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As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of…

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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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I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I…

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This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside…

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Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... whoever…

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They clichés will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at…

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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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I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be…

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Some people have a knack, for example, of being able to tell when someone's lying to them. They may not know what…

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Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They…

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You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is…

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Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, Don't…

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I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very…

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In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced,…

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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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For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty…

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“George Orwell, on how to avoid thinking when you speak: You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting…

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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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No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who…

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The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means…

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Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of…

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Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you,…

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Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually…

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I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you…

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Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to you,…

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The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All…

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“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all…

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The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set…

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Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long…

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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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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.…