Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author. His work is marked by a profound consciousness of social injustice, an intense dislike of totalitarianism, and a passion for clarity in language. Considered "perhaps the 20th century’s best chronicler of English culture", he wrote works in many different genres including fiction, polemics, journalism, memoir and critical essays. His most famous works are two novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Easton Press George Orwell books
Animal Farm - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 1992
Nineteen Eighty Four - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 1992
Animal Farm - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written - 2003
Homage To Catalonia - 2008
Franklin Library George Orwell books
Animal Farm / 1984 - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1978
(This page contains affiliate links for which we may be compensated.)
Author George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, British India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy plantation owner in Jamaica and his grandfather a clergyman. Although the gentility was passed down the generations, the prosperity was not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Burma where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. Eric had two sisters; Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, Ida Blair took him to England.
In 1905, Blair's mother settled at Henley-on-Thames. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit he did not see his father again until 1912. His mother's diary for 1905 indicates a lively round of social activity and artistic interests. The family moved to Shiplake before World War I, and Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially Jacintha Buddicom. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field, and on being asked why he said, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up". Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry and dreamed of becoming famous writers. He told her that he might write a book in similar style to that of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. During this period, he enjoyed shooting, fishing, and birdwatching with Jacintha’s brother and sister.Education
At the age of six, Eric Blair attended the Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames, remaining until he was eight. His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family was not wealthy enough to afford the fees, making it necessary for him to obtain a scholarship. Ida Blair's brother Charles Limouzin, who lived on the South Coast, recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Sussex. The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win the scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement which allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal fees. Later, and with publication delayed until after his death, Orwell was to write Such, Such Were the Joys, an account of his unhappy time at the school. At St. Cyprian's, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who would himself become a noted writer and who, as the editor of Horizon magazine, would publish many of Orwell's essays. While at the school Blair wrote two poems that were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, his local newspaper, came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton.
After a term at Wellington College, Blair transferred to Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar (1917–1921). His tutor was A. S. F. Gow, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge who remained a source of advice later in his career. Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley who spent a short interlude teaching at Eton, but outside the classroom there was no contact between them. Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years they did not associate with each other. Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies, but during his time he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a college magazine and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to university without another scholarship, and they concluded from the poor results that he would not be able to obtain one. However Stephen Runciman, who was a close contemporary, noted that he had a romantic idea about the East and, for whatever reason, it was decided that Blair should join the Indian Imperial Police. To do this, it was necessary to pass an entrance examination. His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time and Blair was enrolled at a "crammer" there called "Craighurst" where he brushed up on his classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam, coming seventh out of twenty-seven.Burma and afterwards
After finishing his studies at Eton, having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family's means being insufficient to pay his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism, as shown by his novel Burmese Days, published in 1934, and by such essays as "A Hanging", and "Shooting an Elephant." He lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in Down and Out in Paris and London, his first major work. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher but ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, an experience later recounted in the short novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
Eric Blair became George Orwell in 1933, while the author was writing for the New Adelphi, and living in Hayes, Middlesex while working as a schoolmaster. He adopted a pen name in order to avoid embarrassment to his parents from the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London. He considered such possible pseudonyms as "Kenneth Miles" and "H. Lewis Allways" before settling on a name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.Spanish Civil War
Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising. As a sympathiser of the Independent Labour Party (of which he became a member in 1938), he joined the militia of its sister party in Spain, the anti-Stalinist far-left POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), in which he fought as an infantryman. In Homage to Catalonia he described his admiration for the apparent absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. He also depicted what he saw as the betrayal of that workers' revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist Party, abetted by the Soviet Union and its secret police, after its militia attacked the anarchists and the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937. Orwell was shot in the neck (near Huesca) on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well as in Homage to Catalonia. He and his wife Eileen left Spain after narrowly missing being arrested as "Trotskyites" when the communists moved to suppress the POUM in June 1937.World war and after
Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot." Despite the good pay, he resigned in 1943 to become literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche. Orwell contributed a regular column entitled "As I Please."
In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. From 1945 Orwell was the Observer's war correspondent and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News. He was a close friend of the Observer's editor/owner, David Astor and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. He wrote the novel during his stay on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland.
Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair (b. May of 1944). She died in 1945 during an operation. In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell.
In 1949 Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which had been set up by the Labour government to publish pro-democratic and anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanation is the simplest: that he was helping out a friend in a cause — anti-Stalinism — that both supported. There is no indication that Orwell ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings — or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all at one time or another made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements.Death
Orwell died in London at the age of 46 from tuberculosis which he had probably contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950.
Writing
During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier (which described the living conditions of poor miners in northern England). According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."
Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is considered an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that Animal Farm was a reference to Stalinism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist.
Orwell is also known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language. In the essay "Politics and the English Language", he decries the effects of cliché, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on literary styles, and ultimately on thought itself. Orwell's concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line — with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas. (cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabulary, such as "memory hole," "Big Brother," "Room 101," "doublethink," "thought police," "unperson", and "newspeak."
The comprehensive edition of Orwell's work was edited by Peter Davison and published in 20 volumes in 1998.
George Orwell quotes
"The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. 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." — From the essay "Why I Write"
"Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income." — From the essay "Antisemitism in Britain"
"What purpose is served by saying that men like Maxton are in Fascist pay?... It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy." — From "Homage to Catalonia" (1938).
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". — From Animal Farm (1945).
"One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up." — From "Manuscript Notebook," (1949).
"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 the essay "Notes on Nationalism" (1945).
"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting." — From the essay "The Sporting Spirit" (1945).
"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". From the Preface of Animal Farm The Freedom of the PressGeorge Orwell books
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933 nonfiction)
Burmese Days (1934)
A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937 nonfiction)
Homage to Catalonia (1938 nonfiction)
Coming Up For Air (1939)
Animal Farm (1945)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)Essays
A Hanging (1931)
Shooting an Elephant (1936)
Charles Dickens (1939)
Boys' Weeklies (1940)
Inside the Whale (1940)
Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)
The Art of Donald McGill (1941)
Looking Back on the Spanish War (1943)
W. B. Yeats (1943)
Benefit of Clergy: Some notes on Salvador Dali (1944)
Arthur Koestler (1944)
Notes on Nationalism (1945)
Nonsense Poetry (1945)
Good Bad Books (1945)
The Sporting Spirit (1945)
A Nice Cup of Tea (1946)
Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)
Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)
How the Poor Die (1946)
Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946)
Politics and the English Language (1946)
Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)
Decline of the English Murder (1946)
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)
A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray (1946)
In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse (1946)
Why I Write (1946)
The Prevention of Literature (1946)
Such, Such Were the Joys (1946)
Riding Down from Bangor (1946)
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
Reflections on Gandhi (1949)
AntiSemitism In Britain
Bookshop Memories
Charles Reade
Down The Mine
Freedom of the Park
Future of a Ruined Germany
In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution
Mark Twain The Licensed Jester
Marrakech
North And South
Pleasure Spots
Poetry and the Microphone
Raffles and Miss Blandish
Reflections on Gandhi
Revenge is Sour
Rudyard Kipling
Spilling The Spanish Beans
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism And The English Genius
The Spike
Wells, Hitler And The World State
Writers and the Leviathan
You and the Atomic Bomb
Easton Press George Orwell books
Animal Farm - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 1992Nineteen Eighty Four - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 1992
Animal Farm - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written - 2003
Homage To Catalonia - 2008
Franklin Library George Orwell books
Animal Farm / 1984 - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1978(This page contains affiliate links for which we may be compensated.)
Author George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, British India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy plantation owner in Jamaica and his grandfather a clergyman. Although the gentility was passed down the generations, the prosperity was not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Burma where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. Eric had two sisters; Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, Ida Blair took him to England.In 1905, Blair's mother settled at Henley-on-Thames. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit he did not see his father again until 1912. His mother's diary for 1905 indicates a lively round of social activity and artistic interests. The family moved to Shiplake before World War I, and Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially Jacintha Buddicom. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field, and on being asked why he said, "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up". Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry and dreamed of becoming famous writers. He told her that he might write a book in similar style to that of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. During this period, he enjoyed shooting, fishing, and birdwatching with Jacintha’s brother and sister.
Education
At the age of six, Eric Blair attended the Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames, remaining until he was eight. His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family was not wealthy enough to afford the fees, making it necessary for him to obtain a scholarship. Ida Blair's brother Charles Limouzin, who lived on the South Coast, recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Sussex. The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win the scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement which allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal fees. Later, and with publication delayed until after his death, Orwell was to write Such, Such Were the Joys, an account of his unhappy time at the school. At St. Cyprian's, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who would himself become a noted writer and who, as the editor of Horizon magazine, would publish many of Orwell's essays. While at the school Blair wrote two poems that were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, his local newspaper, came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton.After a term at Wellington College, Blair transferred to Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar (1917–1921). His tutor was A. S. F. Gow, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge who remained a source of advice later in his career. Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley who spent a short interlude teaching at Eton, but outside the classroom there was no contact between them. Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years they did not associate with each other. Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies, but during his time he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a college magazine and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to university without another scholarship, and they concluded from the poor results that he would not be able to obtain one. However Stephen Runciman, who was a close contemporary, noted that he had a romantic idea about the East and, for whatever reason, it was decided that Blair should join the Indian Imperial Police. To do this, it was necessary to pass an entrance examination. His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time and Blair was enrolled at a "crammer" there called "Craighurst" where he brushed up on his classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam, coming seventh out of twenty-seven.
Burma and afterwards
After finishing his studies at Eton, having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family's means being insufficient to pay his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism, as shown by his novel Burmese Days, published in 1934, and by such essays as "A Hanging", and "Shooting an Elephant." He lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in Down and Out in Paris and London, his first major work. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher but ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, an experience later recounted in the short novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.Eric Blair became George Orwell in 1933, while the author was writing for the New Adelphi, and living in Hayes, Middlesex while working as a schoolmaster. He adopted a pen name in order to avoid embarrassment to his parents from the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London. He considered such possible pseudonyms as "Kenneth Miles" and "H. Lewis Allways" before settling on a name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.
Spanish Civil War
Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising. As a sympathiser of the Independent Labour Party (of which he became a member in 1938), he joined the militia of its sister party in Spain, the anti-Stalinist far-left POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), in which he fought as an infantryman. In Homage to Catalonia he described his admiration for the apparent absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. He also depicted what he saw as the betrayal of that workers' revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist Party, abetted by the Soviet Union and its secret police, after its militia attacked the anarchists and the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937. Orwell was shot in the neck (near Huesca) on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well as in Homage to Catalonia. He and his wife Eileen left Spain after narrowly missing being arrested as "Trotskyites" when the communists moved to suppress the POUM in June 1937.World war and after
Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot." Despite the good pay, he resigned in 1943 to become literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche. Orwell contributed a regular column entitled "As I Please."In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. From 1945 Orwell was the Observer's war correspondent and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News. He was a close friend of the Observer's editor/owner, David Astor and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. He wrote the novel during his stay on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland.
Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair (b. May of 1944). She died in 1945 during an operation. In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell.
In 1949 Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which had been set up by the Labour government to publish pro-democratic and anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanation is the simplest: that he was helping out a friend in a cause — anti-Stalinism — that both supported. There is no indication that Orwell ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings — or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all at one time or another made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements.
Death
Orwell died in London at the age of 46 from tuberculosis which he had probably contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950.Writing
During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier (which described the living conditions of poor miners in northern England). According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is considered an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that Animal Farm was a reference to Stalinism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist.
Orwell is also known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language. In the essay "Politics and the English Language", he decries the effects of cliché, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on literary styles, and ultimately on thought itself. Orwell's concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line — with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas. (cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabulary, such as "memory hole," "Big Brother," "Room 101," "doublethink," "thought police," "unperson", and "newspeak."
The comprehensive edition of Orwell's work was edited by Peter Davison and published in 20 volumes in 1998.
George Orwell quotes
"The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. 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." — From the essay "Why I Write""Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income." — From the essay "Antisemitism in Britain"
"What purpose is served by saying that men like Maxton are in Fascist pay?... It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy." — From "Homage to Catalonia" (1938).
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". — From Animal Farm (1945).
"One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up." — From "Manuscript Notebook," (1949).
"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 the essay "Notes on Nationalism" (1945).
"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting." — From the essay "The Sporting Spirit" (1945).
"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". From the Preface of Animal Farm The Freedom of the Press
George Orwell books
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933 nonfiction)Burmese Days (1934)
A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937 nonfiction)
Homage to Catalonia (1938 nonfiction)
Coming Up For Air (1939)
Animal Farm (1945)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Essays
A Hanging (1931)Shooting an Elephant (1936)
Charles Dickens (1939)
Boys' Weeklies (1940)
Inside the Whale (1940)
Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)
The Art of Donald McGill (1941)
Looking Back on the Spanish War (1943)
W. B. Yeats (1943)
Benefit of Clergy: Some notes on Salvador Dali (1944)
Arthur Koestler (1944)
Notes on Nationalism (1945)
Nonsense Poetry (1945)
Good Bad Books (1945)
The Sporting Spirit (1945)
A Nice Cup of Tea (1946)
Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)
Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)
How the Poor Die (1946)
Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946)
Politics and the English Language (1946)
Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)
Decline of the English Murder (1946)
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)
A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray (1946)
In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse (1946)
Why I Write (1946)
The Prevention of Literature (1946)
Such, Such Were the Joys (1946)
Riding Down from Bangor (1946)
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
Reflections on Gandhi (1949)
AntiSemitism In Britain
Bookshop Memories
Charles Reade
Down The Mine
Freedom of the Park
Future of a Ruined Germany
In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution
Mark Twain The Licensed Jester
Marrakech
North And South
Pleasure Spots
Poetry and the Microphone
Raffles and Miss Blandish
Reflections on Gandhi
Revenge is Sour
Rudyard Kipling
Spilling The Spanish Beans
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism And The English Genius
The Spike
Wells, Hitler And The World State
Writers and the Leviathan
You and the Atomic Bomb
Source and additional information: George Orwell