George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was a British author. Noted as a political and cultural commentator, as well as an accomplished novelist, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the twentieth century. He is possibly best known for two novels written towards the end of his life, in the 1940s; the political allegory Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which describes a totalitarian dystopia so vividly that the adjective "Orwellian" is now used to describe totalitarian mechanisms of thought control.

Quotations from George Orwell

• "The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States." Notes on Nationalism, May 1945.
• "The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." — From the essay "Why I Write" http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw
• "Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income." — From the essay "Antisemitism in Britain" http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/antisemitism/
• "What purpose is served by saying that men like Maxton are in Fascist pay?... It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy." — From "Homage to Catalonia" (1938).
• "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". — From Animal Farm (1945).
• "One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up." — From "Manuscript Notebook," (1949).
• "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." — From the essay "Notes on Nationalism" (1945).
• "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting." — From the essay "The Sporting Spirit" (1945).
• "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". From the Preface of Animal Farm The Freedom of the Press
• "There are families in which the father will say to his child, ?You'll get a thick ear if you do that again?, while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will take the child in her arms and murmur lovingly, ?Now, darling, is it kind to Mummy to do that?? And who would maintain that the second method is less tyrannous than the first? The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power." From the essay "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool" (1947).
• "No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy".