Quotes from Animal Farm / 1984

George Orwell ·  400 pages

Rating: (132.4K votes)


“In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“The idea is always bigger than the man’.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“how men, when given power over other men, start to behave like pigs.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“— Сколько я показываю пальцев, Уинстон?
— Четыре.
— А если партия говорит, что их не четыре, а пять, — тогда
сколько?.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984



“Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“The animals listened first to Napoleon, then to Snowball, and could not make up their minds which was right; indeed, they always found themselves in agreement with the one who was speaking at the moment.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“Animal Farm is a warning to every reader. Beware the utopia; beware the perfect solution and the easy slogan; beware those who claim to know what is best for you; beware bombast and dogma; beware the death of doubt; beware those who do not practice what they preach. Beware the chosen. Beware the one and only true path.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“the god in men is also the devil the moment it begins to masticate on the morsels of power.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984



“But the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness he said, lay in working”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“It says, ‘No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,’’ she announced finally.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“Animal Farm is not a book about how pigs—animals—when bestowed with power start to behave like men. It is a book about how men, when given power over other men, start to behave like pigs.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“Four legs good, two legs bad.’ This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984



“We are the dead,” he said. “We’re not dead yet,” said Julia prosaically. “Not physically. Six months, a year—five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“The other farmers sympathised in principle, but they did not at first give him much help. At heart, each of them was secretly wondering whether he could not somehow turn Jones’s misfortune to his own advantage.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; to-day, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984



“Войну ведёт правящая группа против своих подданных, и цель войны — не избежать захвата своей территории, а сохранить общественный строй.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“first four letters, and used to write them out”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck. Syme”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984



“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word—Man. Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions,”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“These books can be read, independently of their time and place, as a strong preventive medicine against the mentality of servility, and especially against the lethal temptation to exchange freedom for security: a bargain that invariably ends up with the surrender of both.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984


“toiled day in, day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple of years earlier.”
― George Orwell, quote from Animal Farm / 1984



About the author

George Orwell
Born place: in Motihari, Bihar, India
Born date June 25, 1903
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