George Orwell: Trending quotes (page 2)

“As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognise it under strange disguises, and also sympathise with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia.”

George Orwell

From a review of Malcolm Muggeridge's The Thirties, in New English Weekly (25 April 1940)
Context: It is all very well to be "advanced" and "enlightened," to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England? As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognise it under strange disguises, and also sympathise with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia.

“Having defeated your enemy you have to choose (unless you want another war within a generation) between exterminating him and treating him generously.”

George Orwell

Source: "As I Please," Tribune, (24 December 1943)

War

“Having lived in an oriental country I have developed a certain indifference to miracles, and I well know that having delusions, or even being an outright lunatic, is quite compatible with what is loosely called genius.”

George Orwell

Source: "As I Please," Tribune (3 March 1944)
http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/

Country , Indifference

“[...] there is no real Jewish “problem” in England. The Jews are not numerous or powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called “intellectual circles” that they have any noticeable influence.”

George Orwell

Source: Antisemitism in Britain (1945)

Problem

“[...] above a certain intellectual level people are ashamed of being antisemitic and are careful to draw a distinction between “antisemitism” and “disliking Jews.””

George Orwell

Source: Antisemitism in Britain (1945)

Drawing , People

“[...] antisemitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of specific offences (for instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice.”

George Orwell

Source: Antisemitism in Britain (1945)

Personality , Food , Feeling

“[...] antisemitism is rationalised by saying that the Jew is a person who spreads disaffection and weakens national morale.”

George Orwell

Source: Antisemitism in Britain (1945)

Personality

“Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”

George Orwell

“War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface.”

George Orwell

Part III : The English Revolution, § II
The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)

War , Reality , Speed , Change

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

Bad luck , People , Suffering , Knowledge

“In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.”

George Orwell

Source: “Bookshop Memories” in Fortnightly (November 1936)

Money , Time

“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”

George Orwell

Source: "Can Socialists Be Happy?" https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/can-socialists-be-happy/, Tribune (20 December 1943). Published under the name ‘John Freeman’.

Imagination , Business , Happiness , Perfection

“And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. 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.”

George Orwell book A Hanging

Source: "A Hanging", in The Adelphi (August 1931)

Understanding , Food , World , Life

“As to a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc is P. S. Burton, but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Allways. I rather favour George Orwell.”

George Orwell

Letter to Leonard Moore (19 November 1932)
Source: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920–1940, Editors: Sonia Orwell, Ian Angus. p. 106.

Thinking

“There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa.”

George Orwell

Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.
Review of Indian Mosaic by Mark Channing, in The Listener (15 July 1936)

Way , Truth

“National Socialism is a form of Socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker. The two regimes, having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system—a form of oligarchical collectivism.”

George Orwell

. . . It is Germany that is moving towards Russia, rather than the other way about. It is therefore nonsense to talk about Germany ‘going Bolshevik’ if Hitler falls. Germany is going Bolshevik because of Hitler and not in spite of him.
Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau, Time and Tide (4 May 1940). Orwell: My Country Right or Left - 1940 to 1943, Vol. 2, Essays, Journalism & Letters, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, edit., Boston, MA, Nonpareil Books (2000), p. 25.