Quotes About Orwell

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.

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

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature--match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here...he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes. (Hornby's thoughts after reading Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly)

It's intellectual freedom when a journalist can understand that 2 + 2 = 4; that's what Orwell was writing about in 1984. Everybody here applauds that book, but nobody is willing to think about what it means. What Winston Smith [the main character] was saying is, if we can still understand that 2 + 2 = 4, they haven't taken everything away. Okay? Well, in the United States, people can't even understand that 2 + 2 = 4.

An essential mechanism of censorship, in Orwell's view, is a good education. If you've gone to the best schools, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say, or, we may add, even to think. It all becomes part of your being. And if you're a good student and have properly absorbed the lessons, you can become a responsible intellectual. That's the unpublished preface to Animal Farm.

George Orwell coined the useful term "unperson" for creatures denied personhood because they don't abide by state doctrine. We may add the term "unhistory" to refer to the fate of unpersons, expunged from history on similar grounds.

Orwell's words aptly describe the Khmer Rouge: "Big Brother is watching you." Even on the streets of Portland I look over my shoulder. And here I am on these survivors' doorstep, asking them to reveal difficult memories. The Khmer Rouge are a continent away, and yet they are not. Psychologically, they are parasites, like tapeworms that slumber within you, living passively until something stirs them to life. I was asking these subjects to wake those parasites.

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.

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

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

There are eight other instances in the book of Orwell noting the scents of his environment, most of them repugnant. There are two points to be made here. First, sensitivity to odor is a tic of much of his writing. Second, and more unsettling, it is the smell of humanity that repels him. When he notes the smells of nature, even of the barnyard, it is almost always with approval. In contrast, he is always ready to be horrified by mankind.

Ernest Hemingway, also in Spain at the time, provides an illuminating contrast to Orwell. He was as politically naive as Orwell was observant, in part because his macho posing got in the way of seeing accurately.

Orwell was wrong. You don't need repression. You need only the sensory overload of an age of numbingly ephemeral social media.

Drat!" Dr. Orwell said. "He's unhypnotized! How in the world would a child know a complicated word like 'inordinate'?" "These brats know lots of words," Shirley said, in her ridiculously fake high voice. "They're book addicts. But we can still create an accident and win the fortune!

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

A nationalist, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge," wrote Orwell, tends to be "uninterested in what happens in the real world." Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism "has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.

We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call "post-truth," and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. Yet there is little here that George Orwell did not capture seven decades ago in his notion of "doublethink.

When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell's and Bradbury's books could not do this—but we still can.

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

I grew up in adoration of writers like Hemingway, George Orwell, Anna Akhmatova, and that has always been my idea about the artist - that you have to be a brave and freedom-loving person.

Orwell had a very accurate foresight of today's dystopian world we live in. If only he was around to see it.

Social media has absolutely nothing to do with the truth. It has to do with making shitloads of money off ads trying to sell people crap they don't need. But the terrible by-product of that is giving a global platform to the absolute worst elements of society. The result is that 'truth' is whatever you can convince people it is. It's exactly what Orwell wrote about." "How does this country survive, then?

Social media has absolutely nothing to do with the truth. It has to do with making shitloads of money off ads trying to sell people crap they don't need. But the terrible by-product of that is giving a global platform to the absolute worst elements of society. The result is that 'truth' is whatever you can convince people it is. It's exactly what Orwell wrote about.