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.
en
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.
en
Un peu d'air frais, 1939
George Orwell: Citations en anglais
Source: Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Contexte: I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.”
Variante: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
Source: 1984
“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man”
Source: Animal Farm
"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: Why I Write
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.
“He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.”
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”
Charles Dickens (1939)
Source: Homage to Catalonia
“It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.”
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 9; a remark by Boris
Source: Down and Out in Paris and London
“When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.”
Source: Shooting an Elephant
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)
Contexte: A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is "weak," "sinful" and anxious for a "good time." Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.
“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
"Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)
“[…] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.”
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying
“Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.”
Attributed to Orwell in State of Fear (2004) by Michael Crichton, and Picking Fights with Thunderstorms (2005) by Sheila Suess Kennedy
Disputed
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
No source for this quote among Orwell's writings has yet been located, and the earliest published source of this phrase found on Google Books is this snippet https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=kWD0AAAAMAAJ&q=%22truth+is+a+revolutionary+act%22&dq=%22truth+is+a+revolutionary+act%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjs0MKSqpbKAhWH0iYKHXj6ABUQ6AEIJjAD from p. 5 of Science Dimension, Volumes 14–18 (1982) published by the National Research Council Canada. Quote Investigator has an article "In a Time of Universal Deceit – Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/24/truth-revolutionary/ indicating their attempts to trace the quote. The earliest similar remarks they had found were in a 1982 book titled “Partners in Ecocide: Australia’s Complicity in the Uranium Cartel” by Venturino Giorgio Venturini, where the word “universal” was omitted, and a specific originating text was not identified: "In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
Variants:
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies. (Often attributed by Ron Paul to Orwell but never sourced.)
In the mid-19th century Karl Georg von Raumer made a remark, which has a similar meaning. In Geschichte der Pedagogic (1855), he states: 'Jede keimende Wahrheit ist revolutionär gegen den entgegenstehenden herrschenden Irrthum, jede keimende Tugend revolutionär gegen das im Schwange gehende, ihr widersprechende Laster' which translates as: "Every germinating truth is revolutionary against the opposing ruling error, every germinating virtue is revolutionary against popular contradictory lies."
In 1898 French socialist Jean Jaurès said, "When a society, when an institution, lives only by lies, truth is revolutionary." He was speaking with reference to the ongoing Dreyfus Affair. The statement is quoted in Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (2010), p. 262. (She cites Le petit Meridional, 3 July 1898, as the original source.) This seems very close in spirit and in phrasing to the pseudo-Orwell quotation. (The cumulative index to the many volumes of Orwell's writing compiled and edited by Peter Davison does not reveal any direct references to Jaurès or the Dreyfus Affair.)
Disputed
Variante: In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
"Benefit Of Clergy: Some Notes On Salvador Dalí," Dickens, Dali & Others: Studies in Popular Culture (1944) http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/dali/english/e_dali
