Quote

There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

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
Survival
Majority
Except
Opinion
Index
Literary
Merit
Test
Tests

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell
Image
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
George Orwell
Image
I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
George Orwell
Image
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
George Orwell
Image
Sanity is not statistical.
George Orwell
Image
Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.
George Orwell
Image
During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.
George Orwell
Image
A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as robust.
George Orwell
Image
No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
George Orwell
Image
The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.
George Orwell
Image
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
George Orwell
Image
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
George Orwell
Image
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
Image
All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.
George Orwell
Image
Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.
George Orwell
Image
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
George Orwell
Image
Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
George Orwell
Image
Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.
George Orwell
Image
A minority of one... the definition of insanity.
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