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
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
—George Orwell
Topics: Progress
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism
—George Orwell
Topics: Patriotism
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: Revolution, Revolutions, Revolutionaries
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
—George Orwell
Topics: Food, Eating, Weapon
Throughout recorded time… there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.
—George Orwell
Topics: Class
In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act
—George Orwell
Topics: Activism
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
—George Orwell
Topics: Love
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.
—George Orwell
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
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
—George Orwell
Topics: War, Beginning
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
Sanity is not statistical.
—George Orwell
Topics: Sanity
To say “I accept” in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.
—George Orwell
Topics: Twentieth Century
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
—George Orwell
Topics: Responsibility
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life…
—George Orwell
Topics: Reading
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
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
—George Orwell
Topics: History
One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude.
—George Orwell
Topics: Kindness
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
—George Orwell
Topics: Defects, Madness
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
—George Orwell
Topics: Intelligence
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
—George Orwell
Topics: Equality
I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
—George Orwell
Topics: Authors & Writing
The “Communism” of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.
—George Orwell
Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.
—George Orwell
Topics: Rationality
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 squirting our ink.
—George Orwell
Topics: Language, Aptness, Appropriateness
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
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.
—George Orwell
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
—George Orwell
Topics: Defeat
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
—George Orwell
Topics: School, Education
A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself… What am I trying to say? What words will express it?…And he probably asks himself… Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you
—George Orwell
Topics: Authors & Writing
Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.
—George Orwell
Topics: Censorship
Power is not a means; it is an end….
Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself….
The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything…. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends….
We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science…. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless….
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
—George Orwell
Topics: The Future
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job.
—George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
—George Orwell
Topics: Saints
The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
—George Orwell
Topics: Leaders, Courage, Heroes/Heroism
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: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
—George Orwell
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
—George Orwell
Topics: Advertising
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
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
—George Orwell
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
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