George Orwell Quotes

Spend most of the day reading fascisti pamphlets. They certainly have turned the whole country into an army. From cradle to grave one is cast in the mould of fascismo and there can be no escape…. It is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality. It also destroys liberty.

The perfect fascist state needs to operate in conditions of perpetual warfare. Have you ever noticed how the world has been in constant crisis since World War II?

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

Anthemic rock music is inherently fascist - anything intended to move huge masses of people is politically offensive to me.

The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.

All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis.

It is well known that in the Communist countries, and especially in my own, Albania, readers were often called upon to demonstrate their vigilance by detecting and denouncing the 'errors' of authors.

I think one of the very frightening things about the regime of the National Socialists is that it made people happy.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of brainwashing under freedom to which we are subjected and which all too often we are as willing or unwitting instruments

I have a premonition which sounds like utter folly, and yet it will not leave me: the military state will become one vast factory.

Churchill and Hitler are striving to change the nature of their respective countrymen by forcing and hammering violent methods on them. Man may be suppressed in this manner but he cannot be changed.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

It is absurd to believe in the possibility of perpetual peace...Fascist education must be education for battle.

The National Socialist Revolution is not simply the taking of power in the state by one party from another, but brings a complete revolution of our German existence. Henceforth every matter demands decision, and every act demands responsibility.

It is absurd to believe in the possibility of perpetual peace...Fascist education must be education for battle. Fascism believes in sanctity and heroism.

An extreme reflection of the dangers confronting modern social development is the growth of racism, nationalism, and militarism and, in particular, the rise of demagogic, hypocritical, and monstrously cruel dictatorial police regimes…. These tragic developments have always derived from the struggle of egotistical and group interests, the struggle for unlimited power, suppression of intellectual freedom, a spread of intellectually simplified, narrow-minded mass myths.

Hitler is a very great man, like an inspired religious leader—and as such rather fanatical—but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country …

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

In its mad passion for power, the Communist State even sought to strengthen and deepen the very ideas and conceptions which the Revolution had come to destroy. It supported and encouraged all the worst antisocial qualities and systematically destroyed the already awakened conception of the new revolutionary values

The longevity of the Fascist regime can well be measured by the stability and consistency of the norm which has become its central idea: that is, the negation of classes and of class struggles, even the negation of political parties, because every human being and every spiritual force in the country must be entirely subservient to the nation-state, which in its turn is interpreted exclusively by Fascism.

Fascism is very much a mob movement.

One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.

Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.