THE GOOD GEORGE

I have a picture of Orwell on my wall at home. You look at it and he seems to stare at you and say “get a move on”.

The picture below is of a house called Barnhill. It is the house where Orwell wrote 1984, on the Scottish Island of Jura [they make good whisky there too]. I went there on a sort of pilgrimage. It is possibly the most remote house in the British Isles.

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I think it is time for some Orwell’s finer quotes.

“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”

“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.”

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”

“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

“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.”

“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”

“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. “