Essays

by George Orwell

Useless to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ – that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

Consequently two view-points are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?

The central problem – how to prevent power from being abused – remains unsolved.

As soon as he has to deal with trade, finance, industry or politics he takes refuge in vagueness, or in satire.

Wells wears the future round his neck like a millstone, but Dickens’s unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way.

They never learn, never speculate.

he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of making you feel it.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France.

a love of flowers.

In peace time, even when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny standing army,

In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.

they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of the last.

In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman

Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.

However unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common.

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes.

State-ownership implies, therefore, that nobody shall live without working,

For at least eighty years England has artificially prevented the development of India,

it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.

No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.

it is irrelevant whether democracy, at its highest or at its lowest, is ‘better’ than totalitarianism.

It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.

After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this.

We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens.

in our civilization poetry is by far the most discredited of the arts,

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

he has not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done in an earlier age.

If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook.

With such a history as he has behind him, he would be able to see that certain things have to be done, whether our reasons for doing them are ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

thirty years ago it was accepted more or less as a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and – though superior in intelligence – slightly deficient in ‘character’.

All the Jews I had known till then were people who were ashamed of being Jews, or at any rate preferred not to talk about their ancestry,

what about other communities? like lower,middle class etc.

The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained anaesthetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia – the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and ‘not our business’.

By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.

As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of playing the game according to the rules always vanishes.

you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will ‘lose face’.

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.

the ancient English and Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed,

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

‘a frequent desire upon the slenderest provocation to slap the faces of those with whom he disagreed’.

we do not know to what extent he wrote with a ‘purpose’ or even how much of the work attributed to him was actually written by him.

The gods are jealous, and when you have good fortune you should conceal it.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because ‘friends react on one another’ and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true.