George Orwell citations célèbres
“Tous les animaux sont égaux mais certains sont plus égaux que d'autres.”
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
en
La Ferme des animaux, 1945
La Ferme des animaux, 1945
Citations sur les animaux de George Orwell
La Ferme des animaux, 1945
en
Les Sept Commandements (originaux)
Livre La Ferme des animaux, George Orwell, Gallimard, 1984, 30, 2, 2-07-037516-1, Jean Queval, 1945, Folio, fr
La Ferme des animaux, 1945
Original: 1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.
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.
en
La Ferme des animaux, 1945
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. 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.
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Partie du discours de Sage l'Ancien
La Ferme des animaux, 1945
George Orwell Citations
Such, Such Were the Joys
1984
Such, Such Were the Joys
Such, Such Were the Joys
La Ferme des animaux, 1945
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.
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L'immunité artistique, quelques notes sur Salvador Dali, 1944
The old life's finished, and to go about looking for it is just waste of time. [...] You can't put Jonah back into the whale.
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Un peu d'air frais, 1939
George Orwell: Citations en anglais
Part I : England Your England, § IV
The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)
"As I Please," Tribune (8 December 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/tdoaom/</sup>
"As I Please" (1943–1947)
Contexte: The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful.
"The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
Contexte: A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures.
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 3
Contexte: For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I shall be starving in a day or two--shocking, isn't it?' And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne. And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. 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.
Variante: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Source: Animal Farm
“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
This has been attributed to Orwell on the internet, but the earliest source citing him as author appears to be a post from Jsnip4 on the RealistNews.net forum (15 February 2011) http://www.realistnews.net/Thread-realist-news-was-the-capital-gains-tax-just-removed-regarding-bullion. Prior to this, the statement occurred, without attribution to Orwell, in an opinion piece by columnist Selwyn Duke http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/duke/090506, "Stopping Truth At The Border: Banning Michael Savage From Britain" (6 May 2009) https://web.archive.org/web/20150701002957/http://www.conservativecrusader.com/articles/stopping-truth-at-the-border-banning-michael-savage-from-britain.
Misattributed
Source: Review of Hunger and Love by Lionel Britton, in The Adelphi (April 1931)
Source: Review of Zest for Life by Johann Wöller, in Time and Tide (17 October 1936)
Source: "As I Please," Tribune (4 August 1944)
http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/
Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)
Contexte: Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
Variante: For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.
Source: 1984
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: 1984
Contexte: But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Contexte: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
