Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship a...
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform...
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Lit...
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
In the most secret heart of every intellectual ... there lies hidden ... the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.
We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.