George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair, who used the pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 June 1903
CityMotihari, India
tails given
He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.
fear mean thinking
Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so. And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.
thinking substitutes
Using clichés is a substitute for thinking
fascism desirable
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'
elements consideration capacity
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invaria.
ideas inheritance contradiction
To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions
thinking individual lows
We have sunk so low it has become the obligation of every decent, thinking individual to re-state the obvious!
war thinking sea
As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool - and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.
memories sea fishing
My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.
naval dictatorship
There is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.
war views opponents
The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.
coming-back mystical absurdity
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
might horror trouble
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
running writing past
For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.