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Your Quotes for 25 June 2005 - George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair was born at Motihari, India on this day in 1903, the son of an opium agent for the British Raj. He was educated in England (Eton) but skipped university and served as a police officer in Burma. After he was called on to kill an elephant he quit to become, in his own words, "Eric the famous author". He was certainly prolific, he turned out two million words of fiction, reportage, essays, poems, and reviews. Participation in the Spanish Civil War set his opinions of communism and totalitarianism which show clearly in his last two books: Animal Farm and 1984. To avoid embarrassing his parents, he early had adopted the pen name George Orwell.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
     - All from George Orwell, 1903 - 1950

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