George Orwell Quotes to Remember and Share During Troubling Times

orwell quotes past-future

 

Quotes by George Orwell

These traumatic and politically unstable times are often described as "orwellian" which tends to mean in many uses bleak and with huge lack of freedoms. George Orwell is very well known as a British novelist, particularly as an  avid follower of politics. He voiced  his intense dislike against totalitarianism through his most famed works Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). These two novels are the main contributions to Orwell’s esteemed reputation as an exceptional writer and thinker.

He wrote many essays and articles during his short lifetime and is often quoted today because many of his observations seem to have foretold the craziness of today's geopolitics. We offer quotes by George Orwell for you to remember and share as part of your own "awakening".

More from Wikipedia:

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950),[1] known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic socialism.[2][3]

Commonly ranked as one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century, and as one of the most important chroniclers of English culture of his generation,[4] Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[5]

Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian — descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices — has entered the language together with several of his neologisms, including cold war, Big Brother, thought police, Room 101, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.[6]

…Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is often thought to reflect degeneration in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of a future world where the state machine exerts complete control over social life. In 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 were honoured with the Prometheus Award for their contributions to dystopian literature. In 2011 he received it again for Animal Farm.

Quotes:

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell
 

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell
 

In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell
 

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

George Orwell
 

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

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

 

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
George Orwell

 

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

George Orwell
 

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

George Orwell

 

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