the man who made political writing an art

My website:
http://georgeorwell.t35.com

Orwell says:
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage—torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians—which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by our side.
-Polemic, October 1945

Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage.
-Tribune, 19 May 1944

Nowadays the present and the future are too terrifying to be escaped from, and if one bothers with history it is in order to find modern meanings there.
-'Arthur Koestler' 1944

There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man's feeling that life here and now is the only life there is
-'As I Please' 3 March 1944

...when one's belly is empty, one's only problem is an empty belly.
-Tribune 3 March 1944

The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible. War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it causes (the net effect of a war may even be to increase the productive capacity of the world as a whole), nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty. -Tribune 4 August 1944

Sophisticated Socialists may laugh at the patriotism of the middle classes, but let no one imagine that it is a sham. Nothing that makes men willing to die in battle - and relative to numbers more of the middle class than of the working class are killed in war - is a sham.
-'Our Opportunity' 1941

The intellectuals who are at present pointing out that democracy and fascism are the same thing etc. depress me horribly. However, perhaps when the pinch comes the common people will turn out to be more intelligent than the clever ones. I certainly hope so.
-In a letter to Victor Gollancz, Jan 8 1940

;the essential thing is that middle-class people believe that the working class are dirty - and, what is worse, that they are some-how inherently dirty.
-The Road to Wigan Pier 1937

Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.
- 'Arthur Koestler' 1944

Only a few exceptionally gifted speakers can achieve the simplicity and intelligibility which even the most tongue-tied person achieves in ordinary conversation.
- 'Propaganda and Demotic Speech' 1944

There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case.
- 'Books v. Cigarettes' 1946

In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. War, for example, may be necessary, but it is certainly not right or sane.
-'Writers and Leviathan' 1948

There is one way of avoiding thoughts, and that is to think too deeply. Take any reasonably true generalization - that women have no beards, for instance - twist it about, stress the exceptions, raise side-issues, and you can presently disprove it . . .
-'The Lure of Profundity' 30 Dec 1937

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary.
-Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949




At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is not done to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals
-1945 Introduction to Animal Farm

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