George Orwell's full name was Eric Arthur Blair. Orwell was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, British India. Orwell's great-grandfather was Charles Blair. He was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane. Fane was the daughter of Earl of Westmorland. Thus, Orwell belonged to a wealthy family.
He was famously known by his pen name George Orwell. He was an English novelist, essayist and political critic. George Orwell's work is extremely political. He has written extensively on oppressive regimes and institutions. He also produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His most famous work is "Animal Farm" published in 1945. However, the work that shook the literary world was the dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", published in 1949. His other non-fiction works include "The Road to Wigan Pier", written in 1937. In this, he documented his experience living as a working-class person in the north of England.
In 2008, "The Times" ranked George Orwell holding the second position among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". He gained immense popularity posthumously after his death on 21 January 1950. During most of his career, he got recognition for his journalistic skills, essays, columns in newspapers and his books of reportage. Examples include "Down and Out in Paris" and "London". Orwell is truly the most heartfelt and brave writer of all times who has left a deep legacy in the literary world. Below are some of the famous George Orwell Quotes.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others
This quote is from one of the most iconic books of Orwell- Animal Farm. This quote is an encapsulation of the idea that the concept of equality is very subjective. While governments and societies recognize the need to treat everyone equally, some people are treated more equally than others. A good example of this is reservation which works on the same principle of treating the minorities more equally.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
This quote is the most famous one from Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book is utopian literature, and thus, everything in it is upside down. In a dark society with no rules and discipline, everything is the opposite of good. So that war becomes peace, and one thinks that freedom is slavery itself.
Big Brother is watching you.
Big Brother is a fictional character who is anonymous in the book "Nineteen Eighty Four". This character is representative of extreme forms of control and violence. Thus, whether it's normal domestic life or professional life, Big Brother uses hidden cameras to keep track of people's daily activities. And henceforth, it's said that Big Brother is watching you.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
This quote is quintessential to the discourse of politics and history. One who is responsible for writing the past or, in simple words make additions to the history books has great power over future events too. Similarly, one who is controlling the present now has a great hand in making the past. That's because what's happening at present will one day become a thing of the past.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
Who has four legs? The animals and beasts. And who had two legs? Humans. Thus, Orwell is carefully criticizing the human race over here. He's saying that animals are far better than humans that's because humans don't have the feeling of togetherness and love that animals may have. It also means that humans mostly are deceitful, unlike beasts.
Continue reading some more George Orwell Quotes.....
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
We all know that two plus two make for four. Yet if you are suppressed by the use of force and are asked not to give the correct answer, you are denied freedom. It's imperative on the part of societies and regimes to let people speak truthful facts. If one is given that emancipation, everything else will be guaranteed automatically.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Do you want to see what the future would be like? If that's the case, Orwell says that in the future, the human race would be trampled upon by a bigfoot. This translates as the human race would be severely crushed by autocracy and severe oppression in the future. That can be either in the form of autocratic regimes or the sudden loss of the human race.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Political language is ambiguous and double-edged. It may sound very formal and sweet on the face, yet it's extremely manipulative. It's designed in a way that one is made to believe in lies as truthful. Similarly, it's designed to make a heinous crime like murder deceitful. Thus, political language is a weapon in the veil of soft, pure wind.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Liberty is not about saying things that people want to hear just because that pleases them. Liberty is when you are freely available to speak anything and everything you want to. It can be anything that distastes the other person too. Thus, true liberty comes when you own the right to speak whatever you want to.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This quote is yet again from the book "Animal Farm". Here, Orwell is remarking that the creatures looked everything from being a pig to a man and from a man to a pig. Thus, it was impossible to differentiate between the two. This also means that somehow in most traits, humans and animals resemble each other.
Some more eorge Orwell Quotes....
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
Love is certainly a crucial part of our lives. However, if one wants to feel accepted, understanding is even more crucial than love. At the end of the day, we all want to be understood. We all want that others should take us seriously and not trivialize or stigmatize our emotions. Thus, if we feel understood, we automatically feel loved.
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
These times are times of falsities, lies and deceits. There's hardly any truth that exists in the world. However, if one still speaks the truth in these deceitful times, one is a true hero. Speaking truth in the current normative scenario of lies is an exemplary and revolutionary act.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their understanding of their history.
Undermining someone's existence and gaslighting them is extremely easy to do. One has to just question the basis of someone's existence. If you start denying the person's understanding of history, then you automatically make that person feel sceptical about himself/herself.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
Keeping secrets is the hardest thing in this world. It's usually said that if you are successful in keeping your secrets safe from other people, your secrets are safe too. Yet that's not so. Keeping your secrets in hiding from yourself becomes crucial. That's because it's mostly the self that goes about revealing secrets to others!
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
This place is not just the one where there's light. This place is not about literal darkness. Rather the place that's being talked about here is the one where there's no illiteracy, falsities, deceit, etc. So Orwell seems to be establishing the presence of a space that's pure and full of the light of knowledge.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
This quote is often used in the domain of public affairs and politics. It is yet again borrowed from the book Nineteen Eighty Four and encompasses the idea that consciousness on the part of citizens is harmful. That's so because if people get conscious of the atrocities, they would never rebel out of fear. And if ever they rebel, they will become mad out of government oppression that they would never become conscious again.
Few more George Orwell Quotes...
If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
Loving someone has to be pure and natural. It cannot be forced or reinforced by the other person. While being in the process of loving someone, you give them all the love you have in your hearts. Similarly, when you don't have anything else to give, you still give them love. Thus, love is selfless and free.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
Words hold immense power. They can be extremely soft on one hand. While on the other hand, they can be blunt, honest and truthful. It's beautiful to see how people misuse words and language to destroy the notion of civilization. Words are often made devoid of their meanings to destroy the essence. Thus, it's a beautiful thing to notice how vocabulary gives way to power politics.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
There can be many ways in the way we perceive or understand reality. However, reality is nothing but an illusion and a matter of perspective. What may look real to one person may not feel real to the other. Thus, the reality is nothing but a set of thoughts that every individual perceives in their way.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Generations of people tend to consider themselves more superior than others. So that the present generation may imagine itself being more intelligent than the one that came before it. Similarly, the present generation may consider itself being wiser than the one that succeeds them.
