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Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
Jobs
Towards
Irritating
Feelings
Constantly
Inventing
Indiscriminate
Book
Criticism
Exhausting
Reviewing
Praise
Trash
Thankless
Quite
Involves
Praising
Books
Spontaneous
Exceptionally
Feeling
Reactions
Prolonged
Whatever
Critics
Irritated

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Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.
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It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured 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.
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From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
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To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
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[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.
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Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
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It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
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All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
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Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.
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Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
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The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
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There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
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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.
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He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
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No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
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[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.
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Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
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I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.
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The end was contained in the beginning.
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The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing.
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