"There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all."

"When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on."

"The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail."

― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations fighting for the POUM ...

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."

"Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group."

― George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius was published in February 1941, well into the Second World War, after Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. It is a long essay, divide...

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

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

― George Orwell, 1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell’s ninth and final book completed in his lifeti...

Features that illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, this essays create a literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move and entertain.

Now presented in a new annotated edition, The Road to Wigan Pier represents a unique record of a society riven by class inequality and plagued by unemployment, inadequate housing, unsafe working conditions and other social ills, as well as providing an invaluable insight into the evolution of Orwell's political consciousness.

"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable"…In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning."

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