Quote

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.

George Orwell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
Cannot
Exist
Opposite
Thought
Civilization
Opposites
Wells
Hundred
Period
Acquainted
Well
Ought
Claims
Founded
Years
Answers
Argument
Arguments
Simply
Periods
Convince
Four
Answer
Claim
Freedom
Speech
Notice

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
George Orwell
Image
What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.
George Orwell
Image
There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa . Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.
George Orwell
Image
For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.
George Orwell
Image
Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.
George Orwell
Image
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
George Orwell
Image
To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions
George Orwell
Image
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
George Orwell
Image
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
George Orwell
Image
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
George Orwell
Image
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
George Orwell
Image
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
George Orwell
Image
The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
George Orwell
Image
... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.
George Orwell
Image
If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.
George Orwell
Image
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O'Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O'Brien: You do not exist.
George Orwell
Image
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
Image
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing
George Orwell
Image
A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today
George Orwell
Image
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
George Orwell