Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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George Orwell

1903 – 1950 CE

English, poet, humanist, apostle of doubt, and powerful political influence

George Orwel, Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950)
Novel-writing journalist, one of the best English essayists, ranked second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945,” insightful literary critic, humanist, poet and powerful political influence; Orwell transformed a life filled with failure, poverty, and humiliation into literary genius and cultural influence. Originator of many words and phrases that have become part of popular culture—"Thought Police", "Big Brother", “Cold War,” "memory hole", "doublethink", “Orwellian,” and "thoughtcrime”—his writing exposed intellectual hypocrisy, social injustice, totalitarian and authoritarian influences, and turned his difficult experiences into great literature.

Eras

Unlisted Sources

1984

Animal Farm

Inside the Whale

Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1957)

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Lion and the Unicorn (1941)

Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War

Looking Back on the Spanish War (1945)

Nineteen Eighty Four

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language, 1945

Politics vs. Literature

Reflections on Gandhi (1949)

Review of Mein Kampf (1940)

Selected Essays

Why I Write (1947)

Quotes by George Orwell (58 quotes)

“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

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

Themes: Freedom

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“The punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.”

Themes: Crime Punishment

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“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism… the only régime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech. a real Socialist is one who wishes – not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes – to see tyranny overthrown.”

Themes: Socialism

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“If you want to keep a secret, you must hide it from yourself.”

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“It is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly.”

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“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

Themes: Reality

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

Themes: Happiness

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“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

Themes: Power

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“All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

Themes: Warriors

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

Themes: Truth

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“G. K. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who devoted himself to Roman Catholic propaganda.”

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“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well. And if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

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

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“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.”

Themes: Materialism

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

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“Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Themes: Deception

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“The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”

Themes: Imagination

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“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Themes: Time

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“Most revolutionaries imagine that everything can be put to rights by altering the shape of society.”

from Nineteen Eighty Four

Themes: Revolution

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“Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

from Nineteen Eighty Four

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“A jingo imperialist, morally insensitive, and aesthetically disgusting, and although every enlightened person has despised him ... nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there... He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks.”

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“Nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power... power hunger tempered by self-deception.”

Themes: Nationalism Power

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“Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out... let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.”

from Politics and the English Language, 1945

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“Films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary”

from 1984

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“And when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”

from 1984

Themes: Complaint

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“A master of belittlement.”

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“'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”

from 1984

Themes: Control

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“The whole civilized world has somehow been deluded into thinking Shakespeare a good writer, and even the plainest demonstration to the contrary makes no impression, because one is not dealing with a reasoned opinion, but with something more akin to religious faith.”

from Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1957)

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“War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil”

from Looking Back on the Spanish War (1945)

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“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

from Why I Write (1947)

Themes: Books

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“To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.”

from Selected Essays

Themes: Civilization

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

from Selected Essays

Themes: Conformity

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“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

from Animal Farm

Themes: Equality

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“thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation. . . . The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”

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“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought... the English language becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts... the process is reversible”

from Politics and the English Language

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“Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice... One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking... regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”

from Reflections on Gandhi (1949)

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“Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

from Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Themes: Evil Nationalism

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“Whereas socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people, 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them ' I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and—as a result—a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”

from Politics and the English Language

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“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

from 1984

Themes: Paradox

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“Without money, you can't be straightforward in your dealings with women. For without money, you can't pick and choose, you've got to take what women you can get; and then, necessarily, you've got to break free of them. Constancy, like all other virtues, has got to be paid for in money... Marriage is only a trap set for you by the money-god. You grab the bait; snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some 'good' job... And what a life! Licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra. Pram-pushing and sneaky adulteries. And the wife finding you out and breaking the cut-glass whisky decanter over your head.”

from Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Themes: Money Marriage

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“England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the concentration camps.”

from Lion and the Unicorn (1941)

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“You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

from 1984

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“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current”

from 1984

Themes: Hate Aggression

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“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

from 1984

Themes: Confusion

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“the essential crime that contained all others in itself—Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

from 1984

Themes: Crime

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“There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account”

from 1984

Themes: Sex

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“Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.”

from 1984

Themes: Failure

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“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent... the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”

from 1984

Themes: War Revolution

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“It is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.”

from 1984

Themes: Poverty

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“All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.”

from 1984

Themes: Leadership

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“Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches... I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity... He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds...”

from Review of Mein Kampf (1940)

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“Miller is a writer out of the ordinary... in my opinion the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English speaking races for some years past... I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to read at least Tropic of Cancer.”

from Inside the Whale

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“the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life... human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice”

from Review of Mein Kampf (1940)

Themes: Pleasure Problems

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“now and again there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar. The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material.”

from Inside the Whale

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“Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.”

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“When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not,' the individual can practice a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason,' he is under continuous pressure to make him behave exactly the same way as everyone else.”

from Politics vs. Literature

Themes: Paradox Free Will

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“I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin's foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid.”

from Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War

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Quotes about George Orwell (4 quotes)

“He made it his business to tell the truth at a time when many contemporaries believed that history had ordained the lie... His work endures, as lucid and vigorous as the day it was written.”

Anonymous 1
Freedom from the narrow boxes defined by personal history
from Time Magazine

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“Orwell was the saint of common decency who would in earlier days have been either canonized – or burnt at the stake.”

Piers Brendon CE – via BBC
Professor, journalist, and free-lance writer
from Rushbrook Williams

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“Anyone who wants to understand the twentieth century will have to read Orwell.”

Anonymous 1
Freedom from the narrow boxes defined by personal history
from New York Review of Books​

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“The greatest writer of the twentieth century.”

Philip French 1933 – 2015 CE

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