"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it . . ."
from "Orwell’s Proposed Preface to Animal Farm."
"I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure."
from "Orwell’s Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of Animal Farm"
"Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."
quoted in Robert A. Lee’s Orwell's Fiction,
University of Notre Dame Press,
Notre Dame, Indiana, 1969, pg. 106.
"Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless."
Down and Out in Paris and London
"The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and—in the shape of rich men—is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of
boredom ..."
Down and Out in Paris and London
"What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion— the only really felt religion—that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good."
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
". . . prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
"Politics and English Language"
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
Nineteen Eighty-Four
