George Orwell Quotes

I was born under Communism. I know what it's like to live in a system where you can't speak, you have to whisper. Where the state is so pervasive and so intrusive.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

In the Soviet Union, you always have the feeling someone is watching you.

North Koreans are tragically oppressed. Despite the risks to my personal safety, I feel a strong obligation to tell the world about the Orwellian nightmare that North Koreans face.

I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.

In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.

I wanted to choose somewhere public, because I was scared of the KGB.

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

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

The country is not a democratic state. Therefore we fear that they might carry a recorder in their pocket or there may be bugs in the walls, and you cannot be absolutely sure that you get a straight testimony.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

A functioning police state needs no police.

I grew up in a dictatorship in East Africa.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun.

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.

The tale is one of an evil time, When souls were fettered and thought was crime, And heresy's whisper above its breath Meant shameful scourging and bonds and death!

Communism of every type and stripe brings with it an ideological straight jacket. Thought control, brain-washing, censorship, imprisonment, exile, mental and physical torture are the indispensable weapons of Communist rule.

… the inhuman communist police state tyranny

Soviet repression taught the Russians that hope and trust are dangerous, inimical, and treacherous

You agreed with the Dear Leader or you died or ended up in Camp 913.

With the suppression of all political parties, the bases were laid for the totalitarian state.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

'Child 44' has no room for inconsequential choices because Stalinist Russia had no room for them, either.

I grew up under a dictatorship. I knew what it meant for people to not have the ability to freely express themselves.