George Orwell Quotes

Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

Nothing could be less intelligent than to assume, as many respectable persons still manage to do, that the forms of agitation which are popularly summed up in the terms socialism, anarchism, feminism, and pacifism are mere eccentricities of unbalanced minds, seeking to cloak their hatred of restraint and their cowardice under theories of social regeneration.

I do think that my generation is really smart and wants to have political conversations, and so I hope that we can continue spreading our ideas and being able to change how our systems work. So, I guess being an all-American to me is being someone who questions things.

There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.

People become less inhibited from wanting to change social and economic conditions in a radical fashion according to their own interests, and from being prepared to think of state intervention in ever wider spheres as possible and useful for this purpose.

The essential mark of the agitator is the high value he places on the emotional response of the public. Whether he attacks or defends social institutions is a secondary matter.

Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.

The great work of the present for every man, and every organization of men, who would improve social conditions, is the work of education the propagation of ideas. It is only as it aids this that anything else can avail. And in this work every one who can think may aid first by forming clear ideas himself, and then by endeavoring to arouse the thought of those with whom he comes in contact.

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

I think we brought to the world, the United States anyway, the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. I think we showed the world that nonviolence can work to make social change.

Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.

The power to rethink a situation is our greatest tool for transforming the world. This notion is taking hold in medicine, in business, in education. But not in politics and the media. They are the last holdouts of old-paradigm thinking.

We must fight all that we dislike in public life. We must substitute better ideas for wrong ideas.

An Israeli who thinks that his government is doing everything right wouldn't join the Divan Orchestra in the first place.

Drawing the kind of comics that I do takes so long that to specifically address something as transitory as a political matter in it would be about as effective as composing a symphony with hopes that it would depose a despot. On top of that, I personally don't think that my version of art is the best way to deal with political issues at all, or, more specifically, the place to make a point. Not that art can't, but it's the rare art that still creates something lasting if its main aim was purely to change a particular unfair social structure.

If my goal is to change Colombia, which it is because I really think Columbia has to change in many, many ways - I think it has to be a very profound, nearly spiritual maturing process in the Colombian society because I think you have to first be aware of what's happening and it's not easy because many people don't want to see what's happening.

Significant and seemingly impossible social and political change happens more often than we think, and it happens more rapidly than we realize. Even the most momentous change is always possible if one finds the right way to make it happen.

There are in every age new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

The tone and tendency of liberalism...is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.

If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

I think we do need radicals. We need extremists, because that's how change happens.

Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

When men and women think, the first step to progress is taken.

Some say society must change in order to change people. No, people must be changed in order to change society.

I think that the major message of my life and what I hope to be remembered for is someone who managed to change the social sexual values of his time absolutely.