George Orwell Quotes

The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts. When people are divided into "loyalists" and "criminals" a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the "criminals" one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are direct, sincere, and true to themselves.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

It is foolish for people to think they can align themselves and be safe in a police state.

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Surveillance breeds conformity.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

If everybody is happy, then something is wrong with the democratic process.

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

Communism was something so hideous that you had to be an exceptional conformist or a fool not to see the evil around you.

There's a tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible.

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

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.

In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.

I don't want to be a dissident. But in the same time, I don't want to go back home and be silent again.

Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life.

You couldn't have too many dreams because in the Communist regime, everything was cookie-cutter.

For years, decades, the system has taught us to stay quiet. They've made us believe that those who take to the streets to speak up are crazy, criminals, troublemakers.

Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

The ideal citizen of a tyrannical state is the man or woman who bows in silent obedience in exchange for the status of a well-cared-for herd animal. Thinking people become the tyrants' worst enemies.

The state would rather give me an uzi than a microphone.

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

We know what totalitarian looks like, we know what oppression looks like, we know what the dumb culture of totalitarianism smells like. This is it! It's happening now, and the future of the world is being decided. So, get out there, make your own sites, take action!

A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.