I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

George Orwell

Categorized in : Thinking Doors Cities

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

George Orwell

hate inspirational life

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

George Orwell

inspirational life people

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

George Orwell

wisdom inspiring inspirational

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

George Orwell

media believe people

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

George Orwell

politics party book

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

George Orwell

forgotten lying past

It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.

George Orwell

ignorant influence people

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

George Orwell

publicity doe want

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

George Orwell

freedom inspirational life

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

George Orwell

fraud force tyranny

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

George Orwell

deny goes-on

Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

George Orwell

education past thinking

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.

George Orwell

class running past

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

George Orwell

wall gun jobs

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.

George Orwell

party eye heart

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

George Orwell

fifty faces birthday

All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

George Orwell

memorial-day evil ideas

The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion.

George Orwell

million-dollars dollars way

Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

George Orwell

choices evil two

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

George Orwell

fire wings people