George Orwell Quotes About Tyranny

Quotes about: Tyranny

• All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

  George Orwell

  Force, Fraud, Tyranny

• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

  George Orwell

  Inspirational, Life, Freedom

  "The Freedom of the Press" (1945)

• In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

  George Orwell

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Wisdom

• If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

  George Orwell

  Time, Freedom, Future

• Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

  George Orwell

  Color, Atrocities Committed, Tyrants

• The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

  George Orwell

  Truth, Lying, Believe

• They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening

  George Orwell

  Reality, Tyrants, Events

  George Orwell (2003). “1984”, Plume Books

• It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime.

  George Orwell

  Expression, Giving, Anxiety

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.161, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.

  George Orwell

  Father, Son, Persistence

  "1984".

• When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys

  George Orwell

  Men, White Man, Tyrants

  George Orwell (2009). “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays”, p.34, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

  George Orwell

  Book, Facts, Praise

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.265, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.

  George Orwell

  Party, Care, Tyranny

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.344, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• [What Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, [is] that a return to "free" competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.

  George Orwell

  Mean, Winning, Practice

  George Orwell (2003). “Orwell: The Observer Years”, Atlantic Books (UK)

• This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

  George Orwell

  Animal, Half, Tyranny

  George Orwell (2016). “Animal Farm”, p.22, Hamilton Books

• When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved

  George Orwell

  Tired, Blood, Iron

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