George Orwell Quotes - 36 quotes

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George Orwell

George Orwell (1903-1950), was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, India. He was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. He is best known for his dystopian novels "Animal Farm" (1945) and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949), which critique totalitarian regimes and explore... show more

quote icon The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved...

- George Orwell

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quote icon George Orwell: “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’”

- George Orwell

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quote icon “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

- George Orwell

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quote icon But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Never use a long word where a short one will do.

- George Orwell

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quote icon What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.

- George Orwell

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quote icon A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

- George Orwell

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quote icon By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.

- George Orwell

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quote icon A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

- George Orwell

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quote icon In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Never use a long word where a short one will do.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

- George Orwell

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quote icon A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Words and meaning have almost parted company.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning...

- George Orwell

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quote icon Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

- George Orwell

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quote icon In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.”

- George Orwell

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quote icon Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

- George Orwell

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quote icon This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

- George Orwell

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quote icon One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

- George Orwell

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quote icon As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

- George Orwell

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quote icon A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

- George Orwell

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quote icon The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

- George Orwell

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quote icon My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

- George Orwell

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quote icon In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.

- George Orwell

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quote icon All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.

- George Orwell

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quote icon And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

- George Orwell

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quote icon When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

- George Orwell

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quote icon A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.

- George Orwell

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quote icon Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

- George Orwell

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quote icon In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

- George Orwell

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quote icon The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

- George Orwell

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