George Orwell Quotes

We've come into the world of '1984,' but it turns out to be '1984'-Lite.

It seems appropriate that the author of '1984' was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public's lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state.

… we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

When totalitarian regimes are established, they at least have the illusion of the single-minded purpose. But once they establish the stature that's necessary for a totalitarian regime, they tend to flail.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Does Big Brother exist?" "Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party." "Does he exist in the same way as I exist?" "You do not exist.

What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We.

If I were dictator, I'd have a catch-all crime of disrespect.

George Orwell's '1984' frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it's not a celebration of poetic language. It's decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what '1984' shows is that language can be a dirty trick.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.

If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it

Once a person insists on how you are to think he immediately begins to insist on how you are to behave.

Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power. You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of a people without at the same time making it the master of the people's souls and thoughts.

One thing my father said was that if you find yourself in a country where you have to carry papers, you know it has a lousy government.

Dictatorship is a constant lecture instructing you that your feelings, your thoughts and desires are of no account, that you are a nobody and must live as you are told by other people who desire and think for you

The term Big Brother is from George Orwell's book 1984 - where everyone's watched over by a network of cameras called Big Brother. I've never understood why Orwell chose that phrase for somebody watching you all the time. Isn't that more like Creepy Uncle?

Every socialist is a disguised dictator.

He [the Statist] is unmoved by reason, evidence, and history.

Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

I was Chairman Mao's dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite.

It comes down to a choice between the Little Sisters and Big Brother, and I'm going with the Sisters.

Totalitarianism is when people believe they can punish their way to perfection.

I read '1984' at a precocious age, like 8, and when I did the math, I realized that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, was born the same year I was, 1957. I read that book over and over again with the 1960s as a backdrop: anti-war and anti-bomb protests and this general pervasive sense of doom.