George Orwell

George Orwell Poems

When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.
...

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
...

OH! give me the strength of the Lion,
The wisdom of reynard the Fox
And then I'll hurl troops at the Germans
And give them the hardest of knocks.
...

No stone is set to mark his nation's loss,
No stately tomb enshrines his noble breast;
Not e'en the tribute of a wooden cross
Can mark this hero's rest.
...

When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.
...

Summer-like for an instant the autumn sun bursts out,
And the light through the turning elms is green and clear;
It slants down the path and ragged marigolds glow
Fiery again, last flames of the dying year.
...

Sometimes in the middle autumn days,
The windless days when the swallows have flown,
And the sere elms brood in the mist,
Each tree a being, rapt, alone,
...

As I stand at the lichened gate
With warring worlds on either hand —
To left the black and budless trees,
The empty sties, the barns that stand
...

So here are you, and here am I,
Where we may thank our gods to be;
Above the earth, beneath the sky,
Naked souls alive and free.
...

Empty as death and slow as pain
The days went by on leaden feet;
And parson's week had come again
As I walked down the little street.
...

Brush your teeth up and down, brother,
Oh, brush them up and down!
All the folks in London Town
Brush their teeth right up and down,
...

Our minds are married, but we are too young
For wedlock by the customs of this age
When parent homes pen each in separate cage
And only supper-earning songs are sung.
...

George Orwell Biography

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and belief in democratic socialism. Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian—descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices—has entered the vernacular with several of his neologisms, such as doublethink, thoughtcrime, Big Brother and thought police.)

The Best Poem Of George Orwell

Ironic Poem About Prostitution

When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said, 'for twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me'.

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice,
Stood out for twenty-five.

George Orwell Comments

George Orwell Quotes

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

He is as antisocial as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. 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.

The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle- class world, and everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.

A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

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.

For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.

To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

The "Communism" of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

He left behind, as his essential contribution to literature, a large repertoire of jokes which survive because of their sheer neatness, and because of a certain intriguing uncertainty—which extends to Wilde himself—as to whether they really mean anything.

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.

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.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Power-worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose 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.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

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

The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

We of the sinking middle class ... may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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.

George Orwell Popularity

George Orwell Popularity

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