Quotes from Thomas E Ricks

the theme that runs powerfully through all of Orwell's writings, from his early work on Burmese Days through the late 1930s and then through the great essays, and into Animal Farm and 1984, is the abuse of power in the modern world by both the left and the right.

Essentially these books consist of asking the reader to forget about the forest of Churchill's life and instead focus on a few trees that a given writer believes deserve more attention

Most of all, he would have been alienated by America's determined, self-centered individualism

Even so, his friend the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge would conclude that "he was at heart strongly anti-Semitic." At

One gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

Yet Orwell never fit into the BBC. At about the same time, he wrote in his diary, "Its atmosphere is something between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun," Orwell charged in "The Lion and the Unicorn." "It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly." Yet

When he went through a cancer scare and had a benign tumor removed, his sometime friend Evelyn Waugh remarked that it was typical of modern science to find the only part of him that was not malignant and remove it. Randolph was an alcoholic for most of his adult life

in 1942 in an essay in which he meditated on some "visions of a totalitarian future." In it, he explained why he thought the working class would be most resistant to an intrusive right-wing state:

Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him—products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere.

As Orwell once wrote, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"—most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.

For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly.

Orwell once commented that "whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.

is clear now that appeasement rested more on self-delusion than on rational calculation, because it necessarily required faith in Hitler's sanity and trustworthiness.

Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Other wartime leaders would do well to imitate his inquisitive approach. They should not look for consensus, and instead should examine differences between advisors, asking them for the reasons for their different views.

One day in the 1950s, one of Churchill's grandsons poked his head into the old man's study. Is it true, the child inquired, that you are the greatest man in the world? Churchill, in typical fashion, responded, "Yes, and now bugger off." The

Orwell depicts the proletarians as essentially uncontrollable. The state does not try to control them as much as it simply distracts them.

In most places and most of the time, liberty is not a product of military action. Rather, it is something alive that grows or diminishes every day, in how we think and communicate, how we treat each other in our public discourse, in what we value and reward as a society, and how we do that. Churchill and Orwell showed us the way.

Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond.

Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you from enjoying it," he wrote in April 1946. "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, and neither the dictators, nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

The second driver of the current Orwell boom is the post-9/11 rise of the intelligence state.

right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who does not know how to commit a murder. Macbeth is the tragedy of a man who does. . . . Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare's plays in which the villain and the hero are the same character.