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All Left-wing Parties In The Highly Industrialized Countries Are At Bottom A Sham, Because They Make It Their Business To Fight Against Something Which They Do Not Really Wish To Destroy. They Have Internationalist Aims, And At The Same Time They Struggle To Keep Up A Standard Of Life With Which Those Aims Are Incompatible. We All Live By Robbing Asiatic Coolies, And Those Of Us Who Are 'enlightened' All Maintain That Those Coolies Ought To Be Set Free; But Our Standard Of Living, And Hence Our 'enlightenment,' Demands That The Robbery Shall Continue.

-George Orwell

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All Left-wing Parties In

George Orwell

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All Left-wing Parties In The Highly Industrialized Countries Are At Bottom A Sham, Because They Make It Their Business To Fight Against Something Which They Do Not Really Wish To Destroy. They Have Internationalist Aims, And At The Same Time They Struggle To Keep Up A Standard Of Life With Which Those Aims Are Incompatible. We All Live By Robbing Asiatic Coolies, And Those Of Us Who Are 'enlightened' All Maintain That Those Coolies Ought To Be Set Free; But Our Standard Of Living, And Hence Our 'enlightenment,' Demands That The Robbery Shall Continue.

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He Wears A Mask, And His Face Grows To Fit It.

The Point Is That We Are All Capable Of Believing Things Which We Know To Be Untrue, And Then, When We Are Finally Proved Wrong, Impudently Twisting The Facts So As To Show That We Were Right. Intellectually, It Is Possible To Carry On This Process For An Indefinite Time: The Only Check On It Is That Sooner Or Later A False Belief Bumps Up Against Solid Reality, Usually On A Battlefield.

Several Of Them Would Have Protested If They Could Have Found The Right Arguments.

Between Pigs And Human Beings There Was Not And There Need Not Be Any Clash Of Interest Whatsoever.

People Talk About The Horrors Of War, But What Weapon Has A Man Invented That Even Approaches In Cruelty Some Of The Commoner Diseases? 'natural' Death, Almost By Defintion, Means Something Slow, Smelly And Painful.

Winston Churchill Could Not Definitely Remember A Time When His Country Had Not Been At War.

For, After All, How Do We Know That Two And Two Make Four? Or That The Force Of Gravity Works? Or That The Past Is Unchangeable? If Both The Past And The External World Exist Only In The Mind, And If The Mind Itself Is Controllable – What Then?

Joyce Is A Poet And Also An Elephantine Pedant.

The Great Enemy Of Clear Language Is Insincerity. When There Is A Gap Between One's Real And One's Declared Aims, One Turns, As It Were, Instinctively To Long Words And Exhausted Idioms, Like A Cuttlefish Squirting Out Ink.

Political Language

For Weeks Past He Had Been Making Ready For This Moment, And It Had Never Crossed His Mind That Anything Would Be Needed Except Courage. The Actual Writing Would Be Easy. All He Had To Do Was To Transfer To Paper The Interminable Restless Monologue That Had Been Running Inside His Head, Literally For Years.

Is Not Anyone With Any Degree Of Mental Honesty Conscious Of Telling Lies All Day Long, Both In Talking And Writing, Simply Because Lies Will Fall Into Artistic Shape When Truth Will Not?

Except For The Small Revolutionary Groups Which Exist In All Countries, The Whole World Was Determined Upon Preventing Revolution In Spain. In Particular The Communist Party, With Soviet Russia Behind It, Had Thrown Its Whole Weight Against The Revolution. It Was The Communist Thesis That Revolution At This Stage Would Be Fatal And That What Was To Be Aimed At In Spain Was Not Workers' Control, But Bourgeois Democracy. It Hardly Needs Pointing Out Why 'liberal' Capitalist Opinion Took The Same Line.

A Mass Of Latin Words Falls Upon The Facts Like Soft Snow, Blurring The Outline And Covering Up All The Details. The Great Enemy Of Clear Language Is Insincerity. When There Is A Gap Between One's Real And One's Declared Aims, One Turns As It Were Instinctively To Long Words And Exhausted Idioms, Like A Cuttlefish Spurting Out Ink. In Our Age There Is No Such Thing As 'keeping Out Of Politics'. All Issues Are Political Issues, And Politics Itself Is A Mass Of Lies, Evasions, Folly, Hatred, And Schizophrenia. When The General Atmosphere Is Bad, Language Must Suffer.

As Soon As You Think Of Fishing You Think Of Things That Don't Belong To The Modern World. The Very Idea Of Sitting All Day Under A Willow Tree Beside A Quiet Pool - And Being Able To Find A Quiet Pool To Sit Beside- Belongs To A Time Before The War, Before Radio, Before Aeroplanes, Before Hitler.

Revolutions Only Effect A Radical Improvement When The Masses Are Alert And Know How To Chuck Out Their Leaders As Soon As The Latter Have Done Their Job.

England Is Perhaps The Only Great Country Whose Intellectuals Are Ashamed Of Their Own Nationality. In Left-wing Circles It Is Always Felt That There Is Something Slightly Disgraceful In Being An Englishman And That It Is A Duty To Snigger At Every English Institution, From Horse Racing To Suet Puddings. It Is A Strange Fact, But It Is Unquestionably True That Almost Any English Intellectual Would Feel More Ashamed Of Standing To Attention During God Save The King Than Of Stealing From A Poor Box.

In Philosophy, Or Religion, Or Ethics, Or Politics, Two And Two Might Make Five, But When One Was Designing A Gun Or An Aeroplane They Had To Make Four.

If You Have Embraced A Creed Which Appears To Be Free From The Ordinary Dirtiness Of Politics - A Creed From Which You Yourself Cannot Expect To Draw Any Material Advantage - Surely That Proves That You Are In The Right?

They Had Come To A Time When No One Dared Speak His Mind, When Fierce, Growling Dogs Roamed Everywhere, And When You Had To Watch Your Comrades Torn To Pieces After Confessing To Shocking Crimes.

It Said What He Would Have Said, If It Had Been Possible For Him To Set His Scattered Thoughts In Order. It Was The Product Of A Mind Similar To His Own, But Enormously More Powerful, More Systematic, Less Fear-ridden. The Best Books, He Perceived, Are Those That Tell You What You Know Already.

Comrades," He Said, "here Is A Point That Must Be Settled. The Wild Creatures, Such As Rats And Rabbits–are They Our Friends Or Our Enemies? Let Us Put It To The Vote. I Propose This Question To The Meeting: Are Rats Comrades?" The Vote Was Taken At Once, And It Was Agreed By An Overwhelming Majority That Rats Were Comrades. There Were Only Four Dissentients, The Three Dogs And The Cat, Who Was Afterwards Discovered To Have Voted On Both Sides.

What Was Happening Was Only The Working-out Of A Process That Had Started Years Ago. The First Step Had Been A Secret, Involuntary Thought, The Second Had Been The Opening Of The Diary. He Had Moved From Thoughts To Words, And Now From Words To Actions. The Last Step Was Something That Would Happen In The Ministry Of Love. He Had Accepted It. The End Was Contained In The Beginning.

Money Writes Books, Money Sells Them. Give Me Not Righteousness, O Lord, Give Me Money, Only Money.

The Relative Freedom Which We Enjoy Depends Of Public Opinion. The Law Is No Protection. Governments Make Laws, But Whether They Are Carried Out, And How The Police Behave, Depends On The General Temper In The Country. If Large Numbers Of People Are Interested In Freedom Of Speech, There Will Be Freedom Of Speech, Even If The Law Forbids It; If Public Opinion Is Sluggish, Inconvenient Minorities Will Be Persecuted, Even If Laws Exist To Protect Them.

If You Want To Keep A Secret, You Must Also Hide It From Yourself.

Keeping Secrets

All Left-wing Parties In The Highly Industrialized Countries Are At Bottom A Sham, Because They Make It Their Business To Fight Against Something Which They Do Not Really Wish To Destroy. They Have Internationalist Aims, And At The Same Time They Struggle To Keep Up A Standard Of Life With Which Those Aims Are Incompatible. We All Live By Robbing Asiatic Coolies, And Those Of Us Who Are 'enlightened' All Maintain That Those Coolies Ought To Be Set Free; But Our Standard Of Living, And Hence Our 'enlightenment,' Demands That The Robbery Shall Continue.

Many People Genuinely Do Not Want To Be Saints, And It Is Probable That Some Who Achieve Or Aspire To Sainthood Have Never Felt Much Temptation To Be Human Beings.

There Are Some Ideas So Wrong That Only A Very Intelligent Person Could Believe In Them.

Why Was It That They Could Never Shout Like That About Anything That Mattered?

Political Writing In Our Time Consists Almost Entirely Of Prefabricated Phrases Bolted Together Like The Pieces Of A Child's Meccano Set. It Is The Unavoidable Result Of Self-censorship. To Write In Plain, Vigorous Language One Has To Think Fearlessly, And If One Thinks Fearlessly One Cannot Be Politically Orthodox.

If I Had Understood The Situation A Bit Better I Should Probably Have Joined The Anarchists.

In General, The Greater The Understanding, The Greater The Delusion; The More Intelligent, The Less Sane.

It Was With The Last Revolution And The Coming Of Ingsoc (inglish/english Socialism) That The Latest High Learnt How To Keep Their Position Permanently - By Cultivating Ignorance Among The Other Classes And By Constantly Surveying Them Through The Thought Police. Part Of This Strategy Included The Maintenance Of A State Of Continual Warfare, Which Goldstein Discussed In The Third Chapter. The Three Major Powers Were Not Fighting This Perpetual War For Victory; They Were Fighting To Keep A State Of Emergency Always Present As The Surest Guarantee Of Authoritarianism.

Power-worship Blurs Political Judgment Because It Leads, Almost Unavoidably, To The Belief That Present Trends Will Continue. Whoever Is Winning At The Moment Will Always Seem To Be Invincible.

The Planting Of A Tree, Especially One Of The Long-living Hardwood Trees, Is A Gift Which You Can Make To Posterity At Almost No Cost And With Almost No Trouble, And If The Tree Takes Root It Will Far Outlive The Visible Effect Of Any Of Your Other Actions, Good Or Evil.

The War Is Waged Against Its Own Subjects And Its Object Is Not The Victory...but To Keep The Very Structure Of Society Intact.

The Past Is A Curious Thing. It's With You All The Time. I Suppose An Hour Never Passes Without Your Thinking Of Things That Happened Ten Or Twenty Years Ago, And Yet Most Of The Time It's Got No Reality, It's Just A Set Of Facts That You've Learned, Like A Lot Of Stuff In A History Book. Then Some Chance Sight Or Sound Or Smell, Especially Smell, Sets You Going, And The Past Doesn't Merely Come Back To You, You're Actually In The Past. It Was Like That At This Moment.

True Freedom Is The Right To Say Something That Others Don't Want To Hear.

If I Had To Make A List Of Six Books Which Were To Be Preserved When All Others Were Destroyed, I Would Certainly Put Gulliver's Travels Among Them.

... What Is Peculiar To Our Own Age Is The Abandonment Of The Idea That History Could Be Told Truthfully.

One Has To Belong To The Intelligentsia To Believe Things Like That: No Ordinary Man Could Be Such A Fool.

It Had Never Occurred To Him That The Body Of A Woman Of Fifty, Blown Up To Monstrous Dimensions By Childbearing, Then Hardened, Roughened By Work Til It Was Coarse In The Grain Like An Overripe Turnip, Could Be Beautiful. But Is Was So, And After All, He Thought, Why Not?

A Man May Take To Drink Because He Feels Himself To He A Failure, And Then Fail All The More Completely Because He Drinks. It Is Rather The Same Thing That Is Happening To The English Language. It Becomes Ugly And Inaccurate Because Our Thoughts Are Foolish, But The Slovenliness Of Our Language Makes It Easier For Us To Have Foolish Thoughts.

For The Future. For The Unborn.

To Know And Not To Know, To Be Conscious Of Complete Truthfulness While Telling Carefully Constructed Lies, To Hold Simultaneously Two Opinions Which Cancelled Out, Knowing Them To Be Contradictory And Believing In Both Of Them, To Use Logic Against Logic, To Repudiate Morality While Laying Claim To It, To Believe That Democracy Was Impossible And That The Party Was The Guardian Of Democracy.

Antisemitism, For Instance, Is Simply Not The Doctrine Of A Grown-up Person.

Objective Considerations Of Contemporary Phenomena Compel The Conclusion That Success Or Failure In Competitive Activities Exhibits No Tendency To Be Commensurate With Innate Capacity, But That A Considerable Element Of The Unpredictable Must Invaria.

One's Got To Change The System, Or One Changes Nothing.

And The Bigger The Fall, The Bigger The Joke. It Would Be Better Fun To Throw A Custard Pie At A Bishop Than At A Curate.

Looking At The World As A Whole, The Drift For Many Decades Has Been Not Towards Anarchy But Towards The Reimposition Of Slavery. We May Be Heading Not For General Breakdown But For An Epoch As Horribly Stable As The Slave Empires Of Antiquity.

He Gazed Up At The Enormous Face. Forty Years It Had Taken Him To Learn What Kind Of Smile Was Hidden Beneath The Dark Moustache. O Cruel, Needless Misunderstanding! O Stubborn, Self-willed Exile From The Loving Breast! Two Gin-scented Tears Trickled Down The Sides Of His Nose. But It Was All Right, Everything Was All Right, The Struggle Was Finished. He Had Won The Victory Over Himself. He Loved Big Brother

You Must Have Seen Great Changes Since You Were A Young Man," Said Winston Tentatively. The Old Man's Pale Blue Eyes Moved From The Darts Board To The Bar, And From The Bar To The Door Of The Gents ... "the Beer Was Better," He Said Finally. "and Cheaper! When I Was A Young Man, Mild Beer - Wallop We Used To Call It - Was Fourpence A Pint. That Was Before The War, Of Course." "which War Was That?" Said Winston. "it's All Wars," Said The Old Man Vaguely. He Took Up His Glass, And His Shoulders Straightened Again. "'ere's Wishing You The Very Best Of 'ealth!

...men Can Only Be Highly Civilized While Other Men, Inevitably Less Civilized, Are There To Guard And Feed Them.

In The Face Of Pain There Are No Heroes.

It Is Impossible To Found A Civilization On Fear And Hatred And Cruelty. It Would Never Endure.' 'why Not?' 'it Would Have No Vitality. It Would Disintegrate. It Would Commit Suicide.

It Was True That There Was No Such Person As Comrade Oglivy, But A Few Lines Of Print And A Couple Of Faked Photographs Would Soon Bring Him Into Existence... Comrade Oglivy, Who Had Never Existed In The Present, Now Existed In The Past, And When Once The Act Of Forgery Was Forgotten, He Would Exist Just As Authentically, And Upon The Same Evidence, As Charlemagne Or Julius Caesar.

Anyone Who Knows Of A Provable Instance Of Colour Discrimination Ought Always To Expose It.

The Enemy Of The Moment Always Represented Absolute Evil, And It Followed That Any Past Or Future Agreement With Him Was Impossible.

The Seven Commandments: Whatever Goes Upon Two Legs Is An Enemy. Whatever Goes Upon Four Legs, Or Has Wings, Is A Friend. No Animal Shall Wear Clothes. No Animal Shall Sleep In A Bed. No Animal Shall Drink Alcohol. No Animal Shall Kill Any Other Animal. All Animals Are Equal.

One Does Not Establish A Dictatorship In Order To Safeguard A Revolution; One Makes A Revolution In Order To Establish A Dictatorship.

He Had Moved From Thought To Words, And Now From Words To Actions.

The Fallacy Is To Believe That Under A Dictatorial Government You Can Be Free Inside

Never Use A Metaphor, Simile, Or Other Figure Of Speech Which You Are Used To Seeing In Print. Never Use A Long Word Where A Short One Will Do. If It Is Possible To Cut A Word Out Always Cut It Out. Never Use The Passive Voice Where You Can Use The Active. Never Use A Foreign Phrase A Scientific Word Or A Jargon Word If You Can Think Of An Everyday English Equivalent. Break Any Of These Rules Sooner Than Say Anything Outright Barbarous.

Progress Is Not An Illusion, It Happens, But It Is Slow And Invariably Disappointing.

It Was Like Swimming Against A Current That Swept You Backwards However Hard You Struggled, And Then Suddenly Deciding To Turn Round And Go With The Current Instead Of Opposing It. Nothing Had Changed Except Your Own Attitude: The Predestined Thing Happened In Any Case.

We May Find In The Long Run That Tinned Food Is A Deadlier Weapon Than The Machine-gun.

Before The War, And Especially Before The Boer War, It Was Summer All The Year Round.

The Cheaper Books Become, The Less Money Is Spent On Books.

Mankind Is Not Likely To Salvage Civilization Unless He Can Evolve A System Of Good And Evil Which Is Independent Of Heaven And Hell.

By 'nationalism' I Mean First Of All The Habit Of Assuming That Human Beings Can Be Classified Like Insects And That Whole Blocks Of Millions And Tens Of Millions Of People Can Be Confidently Labeled 'good' Or 'bad'...by 'patriotism' I Mean Devotion To A Particular Place And A Particular Way Of Life, Which One Believes To Be Best In The World But Has No Wish To Force On Other People. Patriotism Is Of Its Nature Defensive, Both Militarily And Culturally. Nationalism, On The Other Hand, Is Inseparable From The Desire For Power.

I Am Struck Again By The Fact That As Soon As A Working Man Gets An Official Post In The Trade Union Or Goes Into Labour Politics, He Becomes Middle-class Whether He Will Or No. Ie. By Fighting Against The Bourgeoisie He Becomes A Bourgeois. The Fact Is That You Cannot Help Living In The Manner Appropriate And Developing The Ideology Appropriate To Your Income.

I Sometimes Think That The Price Of Liberty Is Not So Much Eternal Vigilance As Eternal Dirt.

This Life We Live Nowadays. It's Not Life, It's Stagnation Death-in-life. Look At All These Bloody Houses And The Meaningless People Inside Them. Sometimes I Think We're All Corpses. Just Rotting Upright.

They Were Governed By Private Loyalties Which They Did Not Question. What Mattered Were Individual Relationships, And A Completely Helpless Gesture, An Embrace, A Tear, A Word Spoken To A Dying Man, Could Have Value In Itself

By Using Stale Metaphors, Similes And Idioms, You Save Much Mental Effort, At The Cost Of Leaving Your Meaning Vague, Not Only For Your Reader But For Yourself.

All Propaganda Is Lies, Even When One Is Telling The Truth.

Telling The Truth

Certainly All "progressive" Thought, Has Assumed Tacitly That Human Beings Desire Nothing Beyond Ease, Security, And Avoidance Of Pain... Hitler, Because In His Joyless Mind He Feels It With Exceptional Strength, Knows That Human Beings Don't Only Want Comfort, Safety, Short Working-hours, Hygiene, Birth-control And, In General, Common Sense; They Also, At Least Intermittently, Want Struggle And Self-sacrifice, Not To Mention Drums, Flags And Loyalty-parades. However They May Be As Economic Theories, Fascism And Nazism Are Psychologically Far Sounder Than Any Hedonistic Conception Of Life.

It Could Not Have Been Ten Seconds, And Yet It Seemed A Long Time That Their Hands Were Clasped Together. He Had Time To Learn Every Detail Of Her Hand.

So Long As I Remain Alive And Well I Shall Continue To Feel Strongly About Prose Style, To Love The Surface Of The Earth, And To Take A Pleasure In Solid Objects And Scraps Of Useless Information.

Public Opinion, Because Of The Tremendous Urge To Conformity In Gregarious Animals, Is Less Tolerant Than Any System Of Law.

Whatever Is Funny Is Subversive, Every Joke Is Ultimately A Custard Pie... A Dirty Joke Is A Sort Of Mental Rebellion.

Creeds Like Pacifism Or Anarchism, Which Seem On The Surface To Imply A Complete Renunciation Of Power, Rather Encourage This Habit Of Mind. For If You Have Embraced A Creed Which Appears To Be Free From The Ordinary Dirtiness Of Politics ... The More You Are In The Right (and) Everybody Else Should Be Bullied Into Thinking Otherwise.

When You Meet Anyone In The Flesh You Realize Immediately That He Is A Human Being And Not A Sort Of Caricature Embodying Certain Ideas. It Is Partly For This Reason That I Don't Mix Much In Literary Circles, Because I Know From Experience That Once I Have Met And Spoken To Anyone I Shall Never Again Be Able To Feel Any Intellectual Brutality Towards Him, Even When I Feel I Ought To - Like The Labour M.p.s Who Get Patted On The Back By Dukes And Are Lost Forever More.

To The Future Or To The Past, To A Time When Thought Is Free, When Men Are Different From One Another And Do Not Live Alone— To A Time When Truth Exists And What Is Done Cannot Be Undone: From The Age Of Uniformity, From The Age Of Solitude, From The Age Of Big Brother, From The Age Of Doublethink — Greetings!

Every Record Has Been Destroyed Or Falsified, Every Book Has Been Rewritten, Every Picture Has Been Repainted, Every Statue And Street Building Has Been Renamed, Every Date Has Been Altered. And That Process Is Continuing Day Be Day And Minute By Minute. History Has Stopped. Nothing Exists Except The Endless Present In Which The Party Is Always Right.

The Existence Of Good Bad Literature—the Fact That One Can Be Amused Or Excited Or Even Moved By A Book That One's Intellect Simply Refuses To Take Seriously—is A Reminder That Art Is Not The Same Thing As Cerebration.

They Say That Time Heals All Things, They Say You Can Always Forget; But The Smiles And The Tears Across The Years They Twist My Heart Strings Yet!

The Main Motive For Nonattachment Is A Desire To Escape From The Pain Of Living, And Above All From Love, Which, Sexual Or Non-sexual, Is Hard Work.

The Fact Is That Certain Themes Cannot Be Celebrated In Words, And Tyranny Is One Of Them. No One Ever Wrote A Good Book In Praise Of The Inquisition.

I Have No Wish To Take Life, Not Even Human Life

The Belly Comes Before The Soul.

Right Thinking Will Be Rewarded, Wrong Thinking Punished.

No One Is Patriotic About Taxes.

The Atom Bombs Are Piling Up In The Factories, The Police Are Prowling Through The Cities, The Lies Are Streaming From The Loudspeakers, But The Earth Is Still Going Round The Sun.

If There Is Hope, It Lies In The Proles.

The Life Of An Animal Is Misery And Slavery: That Is The Plain Truth.

If Thought Corrupts Language, Language Can Also Corrupt Thought. A Bad Usage Can Spread By Tradition And Imitation Even Among People Who Should And Do Know Better.

Those Who 'abjure' Violence Can Do So Only Because Others Are Committing Violence On Their Behalf.

I Did Try Very Hard To Tell The Whole Truth Without Violating My Literary Instincts.

Nothing Was Your Own Except The Few Cubic Centimetres Inside Your Skull.

Never Again Will You Be Capable Of Ordinary Human Feeling. Everything Will Be Dead Inside You. Never Again Will You Be Capable Of Love, Or Friendship, Or Joy Of Living, Or Laughter, Or Curiosity, Or Courage, Or Integrity. You Will Be Hollow. We Shall Squeeze You Empty And Then We Shall Fill You With Ourselves.

The Way To Make A Million Dollars Is To Start A Religion.

Million Dollars

The Secret Of A Successful Restaurant Is Sharp Knives.

The Essence Of Oligarchical Rule Is Not Father-to-son Inheritance, But The Persistence Of A Certain World-view And A Certain Way Of Life, Imposed By The Dead Upon The Living. A Ruling Group Is A Ruling Group So Long As It Can Nominate Its Successors. The Party Is Not Concerned With Perpetuating Its Blood But With Perpetuating Itself. Who Wields Power Is Not Important, Provided That The Hierarchical Structure Remains Always The Same.

However Much You Deny The Truth, The Truth Goes On Existing.

The Great Enemy Of Clear Language Is Insincerity.

If One Looks Closely One Sees That There Is No Essential Difference Between A Beggar's Livelihood And That Of Numberless Respectable People. Beggars Do Not Work, It Is Said; But Then, What Is Work? A Navvy Works By Swinging A Pick. An Accountant Works By Adding Up Figures. A Beggar Works By Standing Out Of Doors In All Weathers And Getting Varicose Veins, Chronic Bronchitis, Etc. It Is A Trade Like Any Other; Quite Useless, Of Course - But Then, Many Reputable Trades Are Quite Useless.

Free Speech Is My Right To Say What You Don't Want To Hear.

It Is Not Possible For Any Thinking Person To Live In Such A Society As Our Own Without Wanting To Change It.

Thinking Person

The Problem Was How To Keep The Wheels Of Industry Turning Without Increasing The Real Wealth Of The World. Goods Must Be Produced, But They Must Not Be Distributed. And In Practice The Only Way Of Achieving This Was By Continuous Warfare.

The Most Stirring Battle-poem In English Is About A Brigade Of Cavalry Which Charged In The Wrong Direction.

I Think I Exist,' He Said Wearily. 'i Am Conscious Of My Own Identity. I Was Born, And I Shall Die. I Have Arms And Legs. I Occupy A Particular Point In Space. No Other Solid Object Can Occupy The Same Point Simultaneously.

We Are All Capable Of Believing Things Which We Know To Be Untrue, And Then, When We Are Finally Proved Wrong, Impudently Twisting The Facts So As To Show That We Were Right.

... Ages In Which The Dominant Weapon Is Expensive Or Difficult To Make Will Tend To Be Ages Of Despotism, Whereas When The Dominant Weapon Is Cheap And Simple, The Common People Have A Chance... A Complex Weapon Makes The Strong Stronger, While A Simple Weapon -- So Long As There Is No Answer To It -- Gives Claws To The Weak.

High Sentiments Always Win In The End. The Leaders Who Offer Blood, Toil, Tears And Sweat Always Get More Out Of Their Followers Than Those Who Offer Safety And A Good Time. When It Comes To The Pinch, Human Beings Are Heroic.

To Accept Civilization As It Is Practically Means Accepting Decay.

And If All Others Accepted The Lie Which The Party Imposed—if All Records Told The Same Tale—then The Lie Passed Into History And Became Truth. 'who Controls The Past' Ran The Party Slogan, 'controls The Future: Who Controls The Present Controls The Past.

In Places This Book Is A Little Over-written, Because Mr Blunden Is No More Able To Resist A Quotation Than Some People Are To Refuse A Drink.

The Very Word 'war', Therefore, Has Become Misleading. It Would Probably Be Accurate To Say That By Becoming Continuous War Has Ceased To Exist. ... War Is Peace.

Whatever Goes Upon Two Legs Is An Enemy. Whatever Goes Upon Four Legs, Or Has Wings, Is A Friend.

Reality Is Inside The Skull.

To Write Or Even Speak English Is Not A Science But An Art. There Are No Reliable Words.... Whoever Writes English Is Involved In A Struggle That Never Lets Up Even For A Sentence.

In The End I Worked Out An Anarchistic Theory That All Government Is Evil, That The Punishment Always Does More Harm Than The Crime And That People Can Be Trusted To Behave Decently If Only You Will Let Them Alone.

Serious Sport Has Nothing To Do With Fair Play. It Is Bound Up With Hatred, Jealousy, Boastfulness, Disregard Of All Rules And Sadistic Pleasure In Witnessing Violence. In Other Words, It Is War Minus The Shooting.

The Word Fascism Has Now No Meaning Except In So Far As It Signifies 'something Not Desirable.'

Don't You See That The Whole Aim Of Newspeak Is To Narrow The Range Of Thought? Has It Ever Occurred To You, Winston, That By The Year 2050, At The Very Latest, Not A Single Human Being Will Be Alive Who Could Understand Such A Conversation As We Are Having Now?

...the Object Of Waging A War Is Always To Be In A Better Position In Which To Wage Another War.

England Will Still Be England, An Everlasting Animal, Stretching Into The Future And The Past And Like All Living Things Having The Power To Change Out Of All Recognition And Yet Remain The Same.

The Real Test Of Character Is How You Treat Someone Who Has No Possibility Of Doing You Any Good.

In My Opinion, Nothing Has Contributed So Much To The Corruption Of The Original Idea Of Socialism As The Belief That Russia Is A Socialist Country And That Every Act Of Its Rulers Must Be Excused, If Not Imitated. And So For The Last Ten Years, I Have Been Convinced That The Destruction Of The Soviet Myth Was Essential If We Wanted A Revival Of The Socialist Movement.

Socialist Countries

You Would Not Make The Act Of Submission Which Is The Price Of Sanity.

I Watched Him [a 'fat Russian Agent'] With Some Interest, For It Was The First Time That I Had Seen A Person Whose Profession Was Telling Lies -- Unless One Counts Journalists.

Progress And Reaction Have Both Turned Out To Be Swindles. Seemingly, There Is Nothing Left But Quietism - Robbing Reality Of Its Terrors By Simply Submitting To It.

You Asked Me Once,' Said O'brien, 'what Was In Room 101. I Told You That You Knew The Answer Already. Everyone Knows It. The Thing That Is In Room 101 Is The Worst Thing In The World.

Men Use Up Their Lives In Heart-breaking Political Struggles, Or Get Themselves Killed In Civil Wars, Or Tortured In The Secret Prisons Of The Gestapo, Not In Order To Establish Some Central-heated, Air-conditioned, Strip-lighted Paradise, But Because They Want A World In Which Human Beings Love One Another Instead Of Swindling And Murdering One Another.

Preventive War Is A Crime Not Easily Committed By A Country That Retains Any Traces Of Democracy.

No One Believes More Firmly Than Comrade Napoleon That All Animals Are Equal. He Would Be Only Too Happy To Let You Make Your Decisions For Yourselves. But Sometimes You Might Make The Wrong Decisions, Comrades, And Then Where Should We Be?

The Ideal Set Up By The Party Was Something Huge, Terrible, And Glittering-a World Of Steel And Concrete, Of Monstrous Machines And Terrifying Weapons-a Nation Of Warriors And Fanatics, Marching Forward In Perfect Unity, All Thinking The Same Thoughts And Shouting The Same Slogans, Perpetually Working, Fighting, Triumphing, Persecuting-three Hundred Million People All With The Same Face.

In Certain Kinds Of Writing, Particularly In Art Criticism And Literary Criticism, It Is Normal To Come Across Long Passages Which Are Almost Completely Lacking In Meaning.

Language Ought To Be The Joint Creation Of Poets And Manual Workers.

We Have Become Too Civilized To Grasp The Obvious. For The Truth Is Very Simple. To Survive You Often Have To Fight, And To Fight You Have To Dirty Yourself. War Is Evil, And It Is Often The Lesser Evil. Those Who Take The Sword Perish By The Sword, And Those Who Don't Take The Sword Perish By Smelly Diseases.

Nothing Holds It Together Except An Idea Which Is Indestructible.

To Survive It Is Often Necessary To Fight And To Fight You Have To Dirty Yourself.

If You Set Yourself To It, You Can Live The Same Life, Rich Or Poor. You Can Keep On With Your Books And Your Ideas. You Just Got To Say To Yourself, "i'm A Free Man In Here" - He Tapped His Forehead - "and You're All Right.

She Was Very Young...she Still Expected Something From Life, She Did Not Understand That To Push An Inconvenient Person Over A Cliff Solves Nothing.

After 40, A Man Is Responsible For His Face.

There Is A Minority Of Gifted, Willfuf People Who Are Determined To Live Their Own Lives To The End, And Writers Belong In This Class.

They Clichés Will Construct Your Sentences For You - Even Think Your Thoughts For You, To A Certain Extent - And At Need They Will Perform The Important Service Of Partially Concealing Your Meaning Even From Yourself.

We May Be Together For Another Six Months—a Year—there’s No Knowing. At The End We’re Certain To Be Apart. Do You Realize How Utterly Alone We Shall Be?

The Whole Experience Of Being Hit By A Bullet Is Very Interesting And I Think Worth Describing In Detail.

The Masses Never Revolt Of Their Own Accord, And They Never Revolt Merely Because They Are Oppressed. Indeed, So Long As They Are Not Permitted To Have Standards Of Comparison, They Never Even Become Aware That They Are Oppressed.

The Ministry Of Peace Concerns Itself With War, The Ministry Of Truth With Lies, The Ministry Of Love With Torture And The Ministry Of Plenty With Starvation. These Contradictions Are Not Accidental , Nor Do They Result From From Ordinary Hypocrisy: They Are Deliberate Exercises In Doublethink

...in The Negative Part Of Professor's Hayek's Thesis There Is A Great Deal Of Truth. It Cannot Be Said Too Often - At Any Rate, It Is Not Being Said Nearly Often Enough - That Collectivism Is Not Inherently Democratic, But, On The Contrary, Gives To A Tyrannical Minority Such Powers As The Spanish Inquisitors Never Dreamt Of.

Power Is In Tearing Human Minds To Pieces And Putting Them Together Again In New Shapes Of Your Own Choosing.

The English Are Not Happy Unless They Are Miserable, The Irish Are Not At Peace Unless They Are At War, And The Scots Are Not At Home Unless They Are Abroad.

I Hate Purity, I Hate Goodness! I Don't Want Virtue To Exist Anywhere. I Want Everyone To Be Corrupt To The Bones.

He Was Conscious Of Nothing Except The Blankness Of The Page In Front Of Him, The Itching Of The Skin Above His Ankle, The Blaring Of The Music, And A Slight Booziness Caused By The Gin.

Circus Dogs Jump When The Trainer Cracks His Whip, But The Really Well-trained Dog Is The One That Turns His Somersault When There Is No Whip.

You Preferred To Be A Lunatic, A Minority Of One.

The Cat Joined The Re-education Committee And Was Very Active In It For Some Days. She Was Seen One Dag Sitting On A Roof And Talking To Some Sparrows Who Were Just Out Of Her Reach. She Was Telling Them That All Animals Were Now Comrades And That Any Sparrow Who Chose Could Come And Perch On Her Paw; But The Sparrows Kept Their Distance.

If You Want A Vision Of The Future, Imagine A Boot Stamping On A Human Face - Forever.

Now I Will Tell You The Answer To My Question. It Is This. The Party Seeks Power Entirely For Its Own Sake. We Are Not Interested In The Good Of Others; We Are Interested Solely In Power, Pure Power.

Four Legs Gooood, Two Legs Baaad!

Every War, When It Comes, Or Before It Comes, Is Represented Not As A War But As An Act Of Self-defense Against A Homicidal Maniac.

Not To Expose Your True Feelings To An Adult Seems To Be Instinctive From The Age Of Seven Or Eight Onwards.

The Real Power, The Power We Have To Fight For Night And Day, Is Not Power Over Things, But Over Men

It Is Brought Home To You...that It Is Only Because Miners Sweat Their Guts Out That Superior Persons Can Remain Superior.

The Organizing Principal For Any Culture Is War.

The Birds Sang, The Proles Sang. The Party Did Not Sing. All Round The World, In London And New York, In Africa And Brazil, And In The Mysterious, Forbidden Lands Beyond The Frontiers, In The Streets Of Paris And Berlin, In The Villages Of The Endless Russian Plain, In The Bazaars Of China And Japan — Everywhere Stood The Same Solid Unconquerable Figure, Made Monstrous By Work And Childbearing, Toiling From Birth To Death And Still Singing.

The Opinion That Art Should Have Nothing To Do With Politics Is Itself A Political Attitude.

All That Was Required Of Them (i.e. The Brain-washed Masses) Was A Primitive Patriotism Which Could Be Appealed To Whenever It Was Necessary To Make Them Accept Longer Working Hours Or Shorter Rations. And Even When They Became Discontented, As They Sometimes Did, Their Discontent Led Nowhere, Because, Being Without General Ideas, They Could Only Focus It On Petty Specific Grievances. The Larger Evils Invariably Escaped Their Notice.

Most People Who Bother With The Matter At All Would Admit That The English Language Is In A Bad Way, But It Is Generally Assumed That We Cannot By Conscious Action Do Anything About It.

The Communism Of The English Intellectual Is Something Explicable Enough. It Is The Patriotism Of The Deracinated.

Everyone Believes In The Atrocities Of The Enemy And Disbelieves In Those Of His Own Side, Without Ever Bothering To Examine The Evidence.

For A Creative Writer Possession Of The 'truth' Is Less Important Than Emotional Sincerity.

Winston Worked In The Records Department (a Single Branch Of The Ministry Of Truth) Editing And Writing For The Times. He Dictated Into A Machine Called A Speakwrite. Winston Would Receive Articles Or News-items Which For One Reason Or Another It Was Thought Necessary To Alter, Or, In Newspeak, Rectify. If, For Example, The Ministry Of Plenty Forecast A Surplus, And In Reality The Result Was Grossly Less, Winston's Job Was To Change Previous Versions So The Old Version Would Agree With The New One.

What Is Not Hereditary Cannot Be Permanent.

You Were The Dead; Theirs Was The Future.

Man Is The Only Real Enemy We Have. Remove Man From The Scene, And The Root Cause Of Hunger And Overwork Is Abolished Forever.

Never, For Any Reason On Earth, Could You Wish For An Increase In Pain. Of Pain You Could Wish Only One Thing: That It Should Stop.

But If Thought Corrupts Language, Language Can Also Corrupt Thought.

Political Language

A Fat Man Is Never So Happy As When He Is Describing Himself As "robust.

Autobiography Is Only To Be Trusted When It Reveals Something Disgraceful.

Rich People Are Poor People With Money.

If You Can Feel That Staying Human Is Worth While, Even When It Can't Have Any Practical Result Whatsoever, You've Beaten Them.

As I Write, Highly Civilized Human Beings Are Flying Overhead, Trying To Kill Me.

Within Certain Limits, It Is Actually True That The Less Money You Have, The Less You Worry.

Bombing Is Not Especially Inhumane. War Itself Is Inhumane And The Bombing Plane, Which Is Used To Paralyse Industry And Transport, Is A Relatively Civilised Weapon. 'normal' Or 'legitimate' Warfare Is Just As Destructive Of Inanimate Objects And Enormously So Of Human Lives.

Inanimate Objects

When It Comes To The Pinch, Human Beings Are Heroic.

Empowering Others

In This Country, Intellectual Cowardice Is The Worst Enemy A Writer Or Journalist Has To Face ... Unpopular Ideas Can Be Silenced, And Incovenient Facts Kept Dark, Without The Need For Any Official Ban ... At Any Given Moment There Is An Orthodoxy, A Body Of Iedas Which It Is Assumed That All Right-thinking People Will Accept Without Question.

Liberal: A Power Worshipper Without Power.

There Is No Such Thing As A Naval Dictatorship.

There Will Be No Curiosity, No Enjoyment Of The Process Of Life. All Competing Pleasures Will Be Destroyed. But Always— Do Not Forget This, Winston— Always There Will Be The Intoxication Of Power, Constantly Increasing And Constantly Growing Subtler. Always, At Every Moment, There Will Be The Thrill Of Victory, The Sensation Of Trampling On An Enemy Who Is Helpless. If You Want A Picture Of The Future, Imagine A Boot Stamping On A Human Face— Forever.

To Exchange One Orthodoxy For Another Is Not Necessarily An Advance. The Enemy Is The Gramophone Mind, Whether Or Not One Agrees With The Record That Is Being Played At The Moment.

Human Beings Were Behaving As Human Beings And Not As Cogs In The Capitalist Machine.

If Human Equality Is To Be Forever Averted -- If The High, As We Have Called Them, Are To Keep Their Places Permanently -- Then The Prevailing Mental Condition Must Be Controlled Insanity.

Anyone Who Challenges The Prevailing Orthodoxy Finds Himself Silenced With Surprising Effectiveness. A Genuinely Unfashionable Opinion Is Almost Never Given A Fair Hearing.

It Was Intended That When Newspeak Had Been Adopted Once And For All And Oldspeak Forgotten, A Heretical Thought...should Be Literally Unthinkable, At Least So Far As Thought Is Dependent On Words.

Clover Was A Stout Motherly Mare Approaching Middle Life, Who Had Never Quite Got Her Figure Back After Her Fourth Foal.

The Essence Of Being Human Is That One Does Not Seek Perfection.

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