Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

by George Orwell

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”

Tramps hardly ever get away from these subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have nothing worthy to be called conversation, because emptiness of belly leaves no speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except the next meal.

He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.

Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce.

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.

Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies.

the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.

Most educated people simply don’t realise how little impression abstract words make on the average man.

.The people in Inner London could do with one real raid to teach them how to behave.

I have still not heard a bomb go off with the sort of bang that makes you feel you are personally involved.

The aeroplanes come back and come back, every few minutes. It is just like in an eastern country, when you keep thinking you have killed the last mosquito inside your net, and every time, as soon as you have turned the light out, another starts droning.

The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

Characteristic war-time sound, in winter: the musical tinkle of raindrops on your tin hat.

Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country.

The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face.

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons.

The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.

It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture.

For that matter, if you taxed all large incomes out of existence, it still would not make much difference to the taxes the rest of us would have to pay.

A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.

To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.

a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist,” he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.

there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

The typical Englishman is represented as a chinless ass with a title, a monocle and a habit of saying “Haw, haw.”

The result is a style of writing that bears the same relation to writing real English as doing a jigsaw puzzle bears to painting a picture.

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Is not the mere fact of imitation an admission that the real thing is superior?

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.

There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.

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, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.

Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child’s mind works.