Have you ever used back quotes with double quotes and single quotes?
I said, “J said, ‘I said, I am fine..’.”
I try to avoid them.
I said “J said that I had said I am fine”.
Thank you for your advice, SanneT.
So it was advice you were after? I thought you were just playing around again, creating pictures from punctuation marks.
I was wondering if the following style was appropriate.
"George Orwell … conceded that Hayek ‘is probably right’ about the ‘totalitarian-minded’ nature of intellectuals but concluded that he ‘does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than that of the state’. "
If you want to put the whole paragraph into inverted commas, then your use is correct. I take it that the … elipsis stands for further text between Orwell and conceded? Otherwise, it would not be necessary.
One question: does the ‘he’ in “…concluded that he 'does…” refer to G.O. or to Hayek?
oops: ellipsis
concluded that he[Hayek] 'does not see, . . . .
"George Orwell . . . conceded that Hayek ‘is probably right’ about the ‘totalitarian-minded’ nature of intellectuals but concluded that he[Hayek] ‘does not see, or will not admit, that a return to free competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than that of the state’. "
"How relevant is the book to Glenn Beck’s America? In his 1960 essay ‘Why I Am Not a Conservative,’ Hayek observed, ‘Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments’.”
( Hayek: The Back Story By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER, Published: July 9, 2010)
Now that I know that “he” is Hayek, the sentence could look like this:
… that Hayek ‘is probably right’ about the ‘totalitarian-minded’ nature of intellectuals but concluded that he [Hayek] ‘does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than that of the state’."