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World Quotes by George Orwell

45 World quotes by George Orwell

All World quotes George Orwell’s page

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. Orwell warns that emotions like pride and worship often drive societies more than reason. He also notes that the idea of objective truth is slipping away, making lies linger in history.

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Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.

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[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.

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The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

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In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

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Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

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Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.

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All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

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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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By ' patriotism ' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life , which one believes to…

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You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows…

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The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have…

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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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Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth,…

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Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.…

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He [Gandhi] was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of…

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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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The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a…

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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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When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free…

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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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The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be…

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The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life…

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The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule , between good and evil but between two evils. You can let…

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In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914…

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By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole…

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If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what…

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He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to…

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I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such…

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The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong…

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The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life,…

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In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made…

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If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what…

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From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to…

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The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal…

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[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive…

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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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Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of…

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The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all…

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Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic…

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Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons…

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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.…