Quote of the Day (Orwell)

“As against the Victorian writers, we have the disadvantage of living among clear-cut political ideologies and of usually knowing at a glance what thoughts are heretical. A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread—not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group.”—George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan,” Politics and Letters, Summer 1948
(Eric Arthur Blair, born on this date in 1903, adopted the pseudonym “George Orwell” around 1929, at least partly to avoid embarrassing his family with his writing and his hand-to-mouth existence. His warning about the dangers of conformity either to the right or the left remains as relevant now as it did 60 years ago, even though Communism itself now is dead as an ideological force. These days, it’s one’s counterparts in the blogosphere that flame you for straying outside the strict party line.)