Status Updates From Essays

"For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs."

-Orwell, George. "England Your England."

"Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. This brings me back to Henry Miller."

-Orwell, George. Inside the Whale.

"THE struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in Order to say: believe nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government side."

-Orwell, George. Looking Back on the Spanish War.

'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. 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.'

-Orwell, George.

"One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested—his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one."

-Orwell, George. Rudyard Kipling.

"Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product of any great monopoly company, and evidently they are not regarded as having any importance in forming public opinion. There is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the ruling class."

-Orwell, George. The Art of Donald McGill.

"Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend, though a wretched failure as a character, represents the same kind of loyalty as Sam Weller. Such loyalty, of course, is natural, human and likeable; but so was feudalism."

-Orwell, George. Charles Dickens.

"There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old—generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?"

-Orwell, George. Charles Dickens.

"All I had gained was a breathing-space. A little quietude, a little self-indulgence, a little respite from cramming—and then, ruin."

-Orwell, George. Such, Such Were the Days.

"All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude—and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep."

-Orwell, George. Such, Such Were the Joys.

1944: “It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude [in America] that has made it possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale. Books have been written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe and all the rest of the "log cabin to White House" brigade.”

1944: “In America, both in life and fiction, the tendency to tolerate crime, even to admire the criminal so long as he is successful, is very much more marked. It is, indeed, ultimately this attitude that has made it possible for crime to flourish upon so huge a scale.”