Quote

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.

George Orwell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Science
Sentence
Write
Whoever
Art
Sentences
Vagueness
Writing
English
Encroachment
Even
Involved
Adjectives
Never
Struggle
Reliable
Words
Lets
Speak
Writes

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
George Orwell
Image
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
George Orwell
Image
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
George Orwell
Image
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell
Image
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
George Orwell
Image
One must choose between God and Man, and all radicals and progressives, from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
George Orwell
Image
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
George Orwell
Image
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell
Image
They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
George Orwell
Image
The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
George Orwell
Image
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.
George Orwell
Image
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.
George Orwell
Image
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
George Orwell
Image
Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.
George Orwell
Image
Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
George Orwell
Image
The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.
George Orwell
Image
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
George Orwell
Image
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.
George Orwell
Image
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
George Orwell
Image
If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
George Orwell