George Orwell Quotes

In the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day ... a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.

Few people can resist doing what is universally expected of them. This invisible pressure is more difficult to stand against than individual tyranny.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.

When somebody goes outside the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.

I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.

The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.

I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

As an active privilege, it [freedom of speech] ranks with the privilege of committing murder; we may exercise it if we are willing to take the consequences.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Political correctness kills discussion.

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.