Hello Awesome Student -&- Collective Collegiate Classmate Cohorts Commiserating on Commensurate Work:

Some of you are working on Orwell, and wondering on the prompt where it says the instructor will provide you a quote.

You are free of this requirement!

(This is a derivation prompt that I have used in alternate form for English 102 and English 103 ... it shows that it is a mature prompt for the experienced writer who has completed English 101 ...).

However, if you are curious about the quote, and perhaps would like to use it as an epigraph ...

Recall the "epigraph" definition ...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epigraph (Links to an external site.)

Or use it as a body quote; the suggested quote can come from the lengthy, masterful "Charles Dickens" essay ...

Here you go:

All art is propaganda ... On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.

The full quote without excision as shown by ellipses is (see larger excerpt below line):

All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.

A good stretch of the Dickens passage is below.

The whole essay is found at the link at the bottom of this page.

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V

By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as this, will probably be angry with me.

I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his ‘message’, and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message’, whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art. As I said earlier, Dickens is one of those writers who are felt to be worth stealing. He has been stolen by Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives. The question is, What is there to steal? Why does anyone care about Dickens? Why do I care about Dickens?

That kind of question is never easy to answer. As a rule, an æsthetic preference is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-æsthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug. In Dickens’s case the complicating factor is his familiarity. He happens to be one of those ‘great authors’ who are ladled down everyone’s throat in childhood. At the time this causes rebellion and vomiting, but it may have different after-effects in later life. For instance, nearly everyone feels a sneaking affection for the patriotic poems that he learned by heart as a child, ‘Ye Mariners of England’, the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and so forth. What one enjoys is not so much the poems themselves as the memories they call up. And with Dickens the same forces of association are at work. Probably there are copies of one or two of his books lying about in an actual majority of English homes. Many children begin to know his characters by sight before they can even read, for on the whole Dickens was lucky in his illustrators. A thing that is absorbed as early as that does not come up against any critical judgement. And when one thinks of this, one thinks of all that is bad and silly in Dickens — the cast-iron ‘plots’, the characters who don’t come off, the longueurs, the paragraphs in blank verse, the awful pages of ‘pathos’. And then the thought arises, when I say I like Dickens, do I simply mean that I like thinking about my childhood? Is Dickens merely an institution?

"CHARLES DICKENS" essay by George Orwell

This material remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books.

From the Complete Works, XXII, 597.

Written in 1939, first published 11 March 1940 as part of Inside the Whale, a selection of essays also containing ‘Inside the Whale’ and ‘Boys’ Weeklies’.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/charles-dickens/