Critical Essays quotes
14 quotes from Critical Essays by George Orwell, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book.
About George Orwell
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.
And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.
He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud.
Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing.
If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
He is all fragments, all details—rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles—and never better than when he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie…
Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.
A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious.
Wells is too sane to understand the modern world.
All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.
…the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity.
The phrase "Great War", when it occurs in the earlier essays, refers to the war of 1914-18. It still seemed great in those days.
The Friday Letter
One story from the atlas, every Friday.
No algorithms chasing attention. A work, a place, and the connection between them — with the history checked.