George Orwell Burma Quotes

An earthquake is such fun when it is over.

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

Like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot.

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.

Eight hundred people, possibly, are murdered every year in Burma, they matter nothing; but the murder of a white man is a monstrosity, a sacrilege.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. Nineteen Eighty-Four             MYAUNGMYA

By using these informal informers, the MI have become incredibly effective, he said. The reason the system works so well is very simple: it is hard to tell who is an informer and who is not. The

All European food in Burma is more or less disgusting—the bread is spongy stuff leavened with palm-toddy and tasting like a penny bun gone wrong, the butter comes out of a tin, and so does the milk, unless it is the grey watery catlap of the dudh-wallah.

had read a description of this ability to act so well in public in Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind, in which he describes life in 1950s Poland under the authoritarian influences of Nazism and Stalinism. He writes that in such circumstances people must, of necessity, become actors and actresses. ‘One does not perform on a theatre stage,’ says Milosz, ‘but in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room one lives in. Such acting is a highly-developed craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations.

Burmese

cabbalistic

The Eric Blair who finished Eton in 1921 was a naive young snob, with little knowledge of the world beyond the confines of the British middle class. His experiences in Burma, in Paris’s Latin Quarter, among England’s destitute in London and Wigan, and particularly in Catalonia developed his social conscience and honed his commitment to the twin ideals of liberty and social justice with which he remains indelibly associated.

It so happened that Osborne had a colleague called Richard W. Blair who also brought his family to live in a small town in Bihar, where he was posted as Sub-Deputy Opium Agent. It was there, in Motihari, near the Nepal border, that Eric Blair, who later took the name George Orwell, was born in 1903. Orwell was still an infant when his mother, prompted by concerns about her children’s education, left for England with him and his sisters. But a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent’s salary was hardly adequate for a good school, and even though the boy did succeed in gaining entry into a ‘snobbish and expensive’ preparatory school, he was haunted throughout his life by memories of his straitened childhood.20 Later, as an officer with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, Orwell probably smoked opium himself. ‘What are the pleasures of opium?’ he once wrote. ‘Like other pleasures, they are, unfortunately, indescribable.

We Burmese people are totally content,' he replied, hazing calmly into my eyes. 'Do you know why? Because we have nothing left. We have been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until there is nothing left.

They are simply opening up more and more schools so the system will look good on paper. It’s all bluff,’ said one of the professors. ‘It’s only education on paper. They build the building. They put up the sign. And that’s it. After that they go away. They don’t care about quality. They don’t care if the teachers are properly trained, or if the school is fully equipped.

Pagoda are the centre of Burmese spiritual life, and every town and village has one. People visit the pagoda daily or weekly to pay respect to the Buddha relics which are often enshrined there, to meditate, to give alms, or to attend the festivals held on religious holidays. The pagoda is considered a place of spirituality and learning. The stairways leading up to the platform are decorated with educational paintings from Buddhist legend, often depicting the moral lessons in the Jataka tales about the Buddha’s previous incarnations. The peaceful principles of Buddhism, which encourage wisdom and compassion, are instilled through these teachings. The

The revolution is led by pigs with a vision of an egalitarian utopia free from tyrannical human beings, but their ideals are gradually abandoned as power goes to their heads and they become cruel and greedy. They decree that only pigs are allowed to eat the apples grown in the orchard (nutritionally essential for a pig’s brain, they claim), and they breed a terror squad of dogs to police the hens, sheep, cows and horses living on the farm. As the pigs take on the luxuries of the humans they fought to overthrow—sleeping in the farmhouse and swilling whisky—the other animals die of overwork and starvation. Orwell had based Animal Farm on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Stalin’s fearsome drive to collectivize the Soviet Union’s farmland, resulting in the death of millions of peasants.

Big Brother really is everywhere.

GEORGE ORWELL (1903–1950) was born in India and served with the Imperial Police in Burma before joining the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was the author of six novels as well as numerous essays and