Words matter. These are the best Orwell Quotes from famous people such as Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Turley, Michiko Kakutani, Amitava Kumar, Keith Gessen, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
For many, the recent disclosure of massive warrantless surveillance programs of all citizens by the Obama administration has brought back memories of George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ Another Orwell book seems more apt as the White House and its allies try to contain the scandal: ‘Animal Farm.’
Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.
Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
I think that the basement where Orwell washed dishes in Paris was his first lesson in anti-humbug – and part of the lesson is that you have to keep renewing it. And Orwell did that.
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.
Orwell’s ‘1984’ convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.
Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell’s 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.
George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
Every street in London has a camera, and if you ever travel up the M4, it feels as if George Orwell should be your chauffeur.
‘1984’ is terrifyingly relevant. It generates a political conversation, but it’s an exciting piece of theatre. Every day, there are things to be spawned from Orwell’s mind, whether it’s in England or America, terrorist-related or government-related.
Orwell was the sort of man who was full of grievances. He was very loyal. Once he got to know you, he was extremely loyal. He hated passionately and irrationally.
It seems appropriate that the author of ‘1984’ was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public’s lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state.
I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: ‘Anthem,’ by Ayn Rand; ‘1984,’ by George Orwell; or ‘Brave New World,’ by Aldous Huxley.
After spending so much time in America, I started travelling with ‘In Defence of English Cooking’ by George Orwell. It’s archaic and old-fashioned in its Englishness and reminds me of home.
Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.
Dystopian novels, such as Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.
Orwell wasn’t right about where society was in 1984. We haven’t turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us.
I’ve always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ ‘Brave New World,’ and obviously Orwell’s ‘1984.’
George Orwell’s ‘1984’ frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: it’s not a celebration of poetic language. It’s decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what ‘1984’ shows is that language can be a dirty trick.
What is it that unites, on the left of British politics, George Orwell, Billy Bragg, Gordon Brown and myself? An understanding that identity and a sense of belonging need to be linked to our commitment to nationhood and a modern form of patriotism.
One of my favorite books is ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ by George Orwell, and ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ obviously, is a big influence and is one of my favorites.
George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.
With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody’s electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.
In ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ protagonist Winston Smith works at a propaganda department for the state called the ‘Ministry of Truth,’ where inconvenient news can be discarded down a ‘memory hole.’ Orwell was fixated on the idea that under certain governments, the past can be altered or documents rewritten.
When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’.
Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
To be the windowpane – this is basically a bastardization of what Orwell said about good writing – so you can get the conversation going and frame it the right way and make sure people aren’t lost. And then you let the candidates illuminate the issues themselves.
My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn’t one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.
We humans are still a very primitive culture, and it’s one of the traps we’ve fallen into over the course of our lives – to forget our history. That’s why George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ is so profound. It chronicles our short memory.
Much has been written about Trump’s style of speech, which linguists have said is often unintelligible yet deeply compelling. Orwell’s famous 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language,’ centers on the use of abstract words, often by politicians, to obscure reality.
Imagine a world without art: it’s George Orwell’s nightmare!
In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled ‘Inside the Whale,’ about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and ‘Tropic of Cancer.’
George Orwell’s science-fiction classic ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ wasn’t a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.
Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.
