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All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays QUOTES

All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays QUOTES

1 " On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

2 " If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

3 " But every writer, especially every novelist, has a 'message,' whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

4 " Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be “This book is worthless”, while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be “This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

5 " A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

6 " 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. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify--that the German, Russian, and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

7 " If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human being, if you can catch him young enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens’s preoccupation with childhood. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

8 " The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

9 " All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

10 " I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever -- any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is "good" or "bad" -- every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually "I like this book" or "I don't like it" and what follows is a rationalisation. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

11 " To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

12 " What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

13 " People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

14 " Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

15 " A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

16 " When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

17 " In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by “thou shalt not,” the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by “love” or “reason,” he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

18 " But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on "despairing of life" in to a ripe old age. One cannot go on being "decadent", since decadence means falling and one can only said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude toward life and society. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

19 " Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

20 " If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?” he had asked in the great essay on dirty postcards. “Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. "

― George Orwell , All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays