George Orwell is one of the most celebrated sci-fi novelists in the world, with his seminal novel 1984 serving as the baseline of paranoia-fueled dystopia. Animal Farm is another wildly popular entry from his catalogue, and Orwell himself was always outspoken about the intrusion of government, politics, and personal acceptance. Here are 13 quotes from Orwell that define his character…
1. “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
2. “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”
3. “Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
4. “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
5. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.”
6. “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 squirting out ink.”
7. “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
8. “Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.”
9. “Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”
10. “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
11. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.”
12. “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.”
13. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”