George Orwell Quotes About Literature
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No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
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To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
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So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
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The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
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The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
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The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
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Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.
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Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
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Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
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I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
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There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
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Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
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Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
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Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
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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.
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We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
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It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
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Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
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Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
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Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
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Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
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A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
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The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
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War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
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The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
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If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
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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.
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The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
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