George Orwell (1903-1950)

Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.

Quotes

He who controls the past controls the future.
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Writing
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Writing
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

Language
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
The future is a boot smashing a human face forever.
When man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys.
By lack of understanding they remained insane.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage have developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped.
Sanity is not statistical.
..nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been short lived where as adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

War
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Big Brother is watching you.