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
uncles aunt hands
It [England] is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.
writing heart pennies
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?
views hypocrisy behaviour
Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.
law profound wickedness
All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.
literary-merit survival tests
There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
sex twelve example
There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that were too terrible to be clearly mentioned. For example, there was sex, which was always smouldering just under the surface and which suddenly blew up into a tremendous row when I was about twelve.
average would-be literature
As Gove knows.... 'Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.'
country worst-enemy editors
If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
thinking ideas people
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
defeat series
Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats.
war culture principal
The organizing principal for any culture is War.
philosophy two common-sense
The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable...
solitude taste dangerous
...to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife...
night names people
People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.