George Orwell | Quotes Collection

"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, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same." George Orwell

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

"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad." George Orwell

"The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" George Orwell

"The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink" George Orwell

"As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." George Orwell

"They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening" George Orwell

"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." George Orwell

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

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." George Orwell

"Time does not pass more quickly than it used to, but we pass it more hurriedly" George Orwell

"From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned." George Orwell

"Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose" George Orwell

"If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better." George Orwell