George Orwell Quotes

It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.

I never loved totalitarianism and all the ideas of making mankind happy always seemed crazy to me.

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced on his throne.

The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Only the freedom of mind can prevent the state from becoming totalitarian and from issuing totalitarian demands.

I have no desire to go in for tyranny or to play the part of King Charles. I hate tyranny in any field of human activity.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

The more a regime claims to be the embodiment of liberty the more tyrannical it is likely to be.

It is yours [the state’s right] to shackle the body, and restrain our external actions; that is a restraint we understand. Announce your penalties, and we will make our election of submission or suffering. But do not seek to enslave our minds.

An oppressive government is worse than a man-eating tiger.

The spectacle which confronts all Europe today is a great conflict between democracy and dictatorship.

Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.... An attempt to scrutinize men's thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.

Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

Any kind of dictatorship, I'm uneasy. I just don't like dictators. I don't like crowds. I don't like hordes, and I don't like other people telling me what to do. This is probably a reaction against people telling me what to do when I was a kid. I won't join any group, espouse a cause against some other people.

A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.

An oppressive government is more to be feared than a tiger.

Those who abhors democracy would rarely immigrate to an authoritarian state if they have to.

History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient. Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.

I am the government.