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
happiness play piano
But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them.
football hurt play
Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.
book past player
The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon--Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already--lounged across the table, pushing a fourpenny packet of Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb.
act becomes telling truth universal
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act
becomes draw fact forget necessary needed oblivion
(Doublethink) to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed
abolish aim change conscious create crushed daily drudgery high lives low men middle outside places remain shall society
The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittenly conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
giving minorities politics
...in the negative part of Professor's Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.
reality skulls mind
We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
beds men night ready rough safe stand visit
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
men
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
establish power safeguard
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
people
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
good
This kind of thing is not a good symptom.
account gives good himself inside life man reveals series simply since trusted viewed
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.