Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else – that is, it concentrates on an author’s style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.
It’s a queer thing, I thought, to be known as ‘Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist’. A queer trade, anti-Fascism.
I am sentimental about my childhood – not my own particular childhood, but the civilization which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick.
The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.
As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
You do not escape from money merely by being moneyless.
We all rail against class-distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.
A few animals still felt faintly doubtful, but Squealer asked them shrewdly, ‘Are you certain that this is not something that you have dreamed, comrades? Have you any record of such a resolution? Is it written down anywhere?’ And since it was certainly true that nothing of the kind existed in writing, the animals were satisfied that they had been mistaken.
In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.
It is usually known that newspapers do not say the truth, but it is also known that they cannot tell whoppers.
The obvious connection between personal unhappiness and the tendency to easily believe the incredible is the most interesting conclusion of this study.
It is a disagreeable thing when one’s close friend is not one’s social equal; but it is a thing native to the very air of India.
Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether you’ll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing Hilda. Of course in practice one never does these things, they’re only a kind of fantasy that one enjoys thinking about. Besides, chaps who murder their wives always get copped.
The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others.
A ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo.
I have had a long life, I have had much time for thought as I lay alone in my stall, and I think I may say that I understand the nature of life on this earth as well as any animal now living.
Don’t let it happen, it’s up to you.
For years i had been resolved – unconsciously at first, but consciously later on – that when once my scholarship was won i would ‘slack off’ and cram no longer. This resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three i hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work.
Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties. And aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones.