“George Orwell”      
1903–1950

Like Theodore Roosevelt, Orwell believed in Democratic Socialism.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”

“Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”

“If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”

“Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”

“To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.”

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

“He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry -- in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

“Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.”

“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.”

“Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

“In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.”

“[M]an only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life. ”

“And 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 pasages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally. ”

“It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.”

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

“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 squirting out ink.”

“Good writing is like a windowpane.”

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

“Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“The totalitarian state declares itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth. ”

“[H]owever much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing... ”

“[A]ny attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought. ”

“So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

“Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.”

“The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.”
“The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. ... Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.”

online PDF:
“Politics and the English Language”

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