George Orwell Quotes

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.

The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.

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.

In Russia, history is often written in pencil so it can be more easily erased.

I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control.

The respected intellectuals are those who conform and serve power interests.

In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

It strikes me there's a bunch of people in power who have really strong intentions of running the world and adjusting the world to exactly how they see it.

Big Brother doesn't like all these Little Brothers looking at it.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.

In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything.

We have to stop the propaganda, the shameful propaganda used by Kremlin to rehabilitate these old types.

We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.

The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.

One of the ways the North Korea regime has kept power is by keeping its people ignorant of the living standards in the outside world. That's the underlying lie that supports the regime - not that their country is 'normal' but that they are better off.