Quotes About Orwell

In his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including "never use a long word where a short one will do" and "never use the passive where you can use the active." But the sixth rule was the key: "Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

Politics and the English Language," George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including "never use a long word where a short one will do" and "never use the passive where you can use the active.

I've always agreed with the view that — with science fiction — its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell's 1984, where he explicitly said "It's 1948, reversed." I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life.

Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books.

I think that the basement where Orwell washed dishes in Paris was his first lesson in anti-humbug - and part of the lesson is that you have to keep renewing it. And Orwell did that.

The total effect of Orwell's work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor.

They were roses, and they were saboteurs of my own long acceptance of a conventional version of Orwell and invitations to dig deeper. They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about injustice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.

As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn't have time to do much else.

But other countries have gone the other way. Australia is now building internment camps for Covid quarantine. It calls them "centers for national resilience."14 George Orwell would be proud.

Orwell wasn't right about where society was in 1984. We haven't turned into that sort of surveillance society. But that may be, at least in small part, because of his book. The notion that ubiquitous surveillance and state manipulation of the media is evil is deeply engrained in us.

Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!

In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled 'Inside the Whale,' about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and 'Tropic of Cancer.'

When the chips are down, Orwell argued, our workers do not defend their class but their country, and they associate their country with a gentle way of life in which unusual and eccentric habits – such as not killing one another – are accepted as the way things are. In these respects, Orwell also thought, the leftist intellectuals will always misunderstand the workers, who want nothing to do with a self-vaunting disloyalty that only intellectuals can afford.

In politics, the near future is likely to be closer to George Orwell's 1984 than to Brave New World.

Orwell is almost our litmus test. Some of his satirical writing looks like reality these days.

One of the best and most challenging books about Orwell is by the socialist literary critic Raymond Williams. As a critic - and, in some ways, as a figure, at least within the academy - Williams was what England had in the generation after Orwell, and toward the end of his life, he became more critical of his predecessor.

We may not be able to communicate that meaning to a world gone insane, but as Orwell knew, simply by staying sane when everyone else is mad, we may hope to convey the human heritage.

Orwell envisioned a future in which an all-seeing dictatorship would stamp out free thinking and outlaw human intimacy. But the internet has given us something far closer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sales of both books shot up the charts after Trump was elected (along with Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism). Orwell's fear was that Big Brother would always be watching you. Huxley's dread was that we would be too busy watching Big Brother on TV to care. There is no need to ban books if people are not reading them. If the people are entertained, they will also be docile.

These things did not happen simply because Reagan gave a speech or because Orwell wrote a book: the remainder of this book complicates the causation. It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.

In one of the more penetrating criticisms written on this subject, George Orwell expressed a profound truth in saying that "the energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions.

Now, a decade and a half later, after re-reading Orwell and Huxley, we need to ask ourselves a tough question: is the Internet really unique in being immune to censorship or control?

But it was more than that. There was an indefinable ingredient, a kind of excitement. It had something to do with history and the past, that excitement, and something to do with potential as well, with what Orwell or somebody had said. that every man really knew in his heart the finest place to be was the countryside on a summer's day. I was happy, that's what it was.

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink