Eric Arthur Blair (1903–50,) known by his pseudonym George Orwell, was a British novelist and essayist who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949.)
Born in Motihari in colonial India, Orwell, the son of a British colonial civil servant, was educated in England. After graduating from Eton College, Orwell joined the police administration in British India but resigned to become a writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris and took menial jobs; he described his experiences in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933.)
Orwell was an anarchist in the late 1920s and a socialist by the 1930s. When he traveled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against General Franco’s Nationalists in 1936, he fled from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The incident turned him into a lifetime anti-Stalinist.
At the onset of World War II, Orwell worked for the BBC on war propaganda, and in 1943, became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By then, he had established himself as a prolific journalist and wrote articles, reviews, and books.
Orwell’s work is characterized by his concern for social injustice. His most famous works include Animal Farm, a political fable set in a farmyard, but a satire on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian description of a future state in which every aspect of life is controlled by a totalitarian figure called Big Brother whose central party’s slogans are “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Originally titled The Last Man in Europe, Nineteen Eighty-Four brought to widespread use such phrases as “Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,” and “doublethink.”
As he was finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s health was worsening, and he died of tuberculosis in 1950.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Orwell
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
—George Orwell
Topics: Survival, Fighting
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
—George Orwell
Topics: Class
He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.
—George Orwell
We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men
—George Orwell
Topics: Duty
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
—George Orwell
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.
—George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad.
—George Orwell
Topics: Animals
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.
—George Orwell
Topics: Suffering
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
—George Orwell
Topics: Politics
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
—George Orwell
Topics: Truth
Kipling sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.
—George Orwell
Topics: Security
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
—George Orwell
Topics: Truth
You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm.
—George Orwell
Topics: Security
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
—George Orwell
Topics: Happiness
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
—George Orwell
Topics: Generations
A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
—George Orwell
Topics: Liberalism
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
—George Orwell
Topics: Revolution
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
—George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
—George Orwell
Topics: Saints
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
—George Orwell
Topics: Nationalities, Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.
—George Orwell
Topics: Fanaticism
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).
—George Orwell
Topics: Religion, Atheism
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
—George Orwell
Topics: Oppression
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
—George Orwell
Topics: Language
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
—George Orwell
Topics: Responsibility
Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.
—George Orwell
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
—George Orwell
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
The “Communism” of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.
—George Orwell
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
—George Orwell
Topics: Freedom
Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.
—George Orwell
Topics: Revolutionaries, Revolutions, Revolution
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