To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing...

[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.

The total effect of Orwell’s work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualised a distinctive squalor.