O is for Orwell #AtoZChallenge

Today I’m continuing with the Blogging from A-Z Challenge! I’ll be posting every day except Sundays throughout April. This year, my readers voted for the theme “My Favourite Book Quotes”. So I’ve collected together the quotations that move me, inspire me and make me smile. I hope you enjoy them!

For letter O, I’ve chosen dystopian author George Orwell. I borrowed my grandad’s copy of Animal Farm when I was about 14, and though I didn’t fully understand the political allegory, I found it very interesting. I later studied Nineteen Eighty-Four at school and was fascinated. It’s amazing how it’s still relevant today. I’ve been hooked on dystopian books ever since.

My Favourite Quotes by George Orwell

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

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

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

“Comrades!’ he cried. ‘You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”

“…And the behaviour of the cat was somewhat peculiar. It was soon noticed that when there was work to be done the cat could never be found. She would vanish for hours on end, and then reappear at meal-times, or in the evening after work was over, as though nothing had happened. But she always made such excellent excuses , and purred so affectionately , that it was impossible not to believe in her good intentions.”

George Orwell, Animal Farm

Do you like George Orwell’s literature? Do you have a favourite quote by an author or from a book beginning with O? Let me know in the comments!