Best known for his satirical novels: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) and Animal Farm (1945), english novelist, polemical journalist, literary critic, and poet, Eric Arthur Blair, more popularly known as George Orwell, and his thoughts on:
Happiness
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
Honesty
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
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?
Morality
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
Media
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Sides
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
Politics
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Liberals
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
Sainthood
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
Generations
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Writing
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
Bias
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
Doublethink
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Freedom
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Democracy
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
Homo Sapiens
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
Invulnerability
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
Lunatics
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
Tragedy
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
Equality
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Propaganda
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Representation
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
Justification
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
Love
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
Some interesting quotes there.
Ah, democracy. What a mindmaze that ends up being if we dare to ponder. With a global economic meltdown, rising joblessness, never-ending poverty, disease across Africa, etc, etc, etc, is it just possible that we spend far too much time voting and not enough time thinking and doing?