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All People Who Have Reached The Point Of Becoming Nations Tend To Despise Foreigners, But There Is Not Much Doubt That The English-speaking Races Are The Worst Offenders. One Can See This From The Fact That As Soon As They Become Fully Aware Of Any Foreign Race They Invent An Insulting Nickname For It.

-George Orwell

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All People Who Have

George Orwell

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All People Who Have Reached The Point Of Becoming Nations Tend To Despise Foreigners, But There Is Not Much Doubt That The English-speaking Races Are The Worst Offenders. One Can See This From The Fact That As Soon As They Become Fully Aware Of Any Foreign Race They Invent An Insulting Nickname For It.

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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.

He Drove His Mind Into The Abyss Where Poetry Is Written.

The Writers I Care About Most And Never Grow Tired Of Are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert And, Among Modern Writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot And D. H. Lawrence. But I Believe The Modern Writer Who Has Influenced Me Most Is Somerset Maugham, Whom I Admire Immensely For His Power Of Telling A Story Straightforwardly And Without Frills.

The Object Of Power Is Power.

At Fifty Everyone Has The Face He Deserves.

For If Leisure And Security Were Enjoyed By All Alike, The Great Mass Of Human Beings Who Are Normally Stupefied By Poverty Would Become Literate And Would Learn To Think For Themselves; And When Once They Had Done This, They Would Sooner Or Later Realise That The Privileged Minority Had No Function, And They Would Sweep It Away. In The Long Run, A Hierarchical Society Was Only Possible On A Basis Of Poverty And Ignorance.

The Weariness Of The Cell Is The Vigour Of The Organism.

The Only Imaginative Prose Writer Of The Slightest Value Who Has Appeared Among The English-speaking Races For Some Years Past.

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

Man Serves The Interests Of No Creature Except Himself.

Threats To Freedom Of Speech, Writing And Action, Though Often Trivial In Isolation, Are Cumulative In Their Effect And, Unless Checked, Lead To A General Disrespect For The Rights Of The Citizen.

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.

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.

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.

Mrs Weaver Nosed Among The Books, Too Dim-witted To Grasp That They Were In Alphabetical Order.

They Could Be Made To Accept The Most Flagrant Violations Of Reality, Because They Never Fully Grasped The Enormity Of What Was Demanded Of Them, And Were Not Sufficiently Interested In Public Events To Notice What Was Happening

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.

Can You Not Understand That Liberty Is Worth More Than Ribbons?

Her Feelings Were Her Own, And Could Not Be Altered From Outside. It Would Not Have Occurred To Her That An Action Which Is Ineffectual Thereby Becomes Meaningless. If You Loved Someone, You Loved Him, And When You Had Nothing Else To Give, You Still Gave Him Love.

The Books One Reads In Childhood, And Perhaps Most Of All The Bad And Good Bad Books, Create In One's Mind A Sort Of False Map Of The World, A Series Of Fabulous Countries Into Which One Can Retreat At Odd Moments Throughout The Rest Of Life, And Which In Some Cases Can Survive A Visit To The Real Countries Which They Are Supposed To Represent.

Nearly All Creators Of Utopia Have Resembled The Man Who Has Toothache, And Therefore Thinks Happiness Consists In Not Having Toothache. They Wanted To Produce A Perfect Society By An Endless Continuation Of Something That Had Only Been Valuable Because It Was Temporary. The Wider Course Would Be To Say That There Are Certain Lines Along Which Humanity Must Move, The Grand Strategy Is Mapped Out, But Detailed Prophecy Is Not Our Business. Whoever Tries To Imagine Perfection Simply Reveals His Own Emptiness.

Orthodoxy Is Unconsciousness.

Unconsciousness

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.

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

Freedom Of The Press, If It Means Anything At All, Means The Freedom To Criticize And Oppose

Freedom Of The Press

To Accept Civilization As It Is Practically Means Accepting Decay.

By Revolution We Become More Ourselves, Not Less.

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.

Whoever Is Winning At The Moment Will Always Seem To Be Invincible.

As I Write, Highly Civilized Human Beings Are Flying Overhead, Trying To Kill Me. They Do Not Feel Any Enmity Against Me As An Individual, Nor I Against Them. They Are Only 'doing Their Duty'

The Secret Of Rulership Is To Combine A Belief In One’s Own Infallibility With A Power To Learn From Past Mistakes.

By The Time You Have Perfected Any Style Of Writing, You Have Always Outgrown It.

The Smell Of Her Hair, The Taste Of Her Mouth, The Feeling Of Her Skin Seemed To Have Got Inside Him, Or Into The Air All Round Him. She Had Become A Physical Necessity.

Even The Humblest Party Member Is Expected To Be Competent, Industrious, And Even Intelligent Within Narrow Limits, But It Is Also Necessary That He Should Be A Credulous And Ignorant Fanatic Whose Prevailing Moods Are Fear, Hatred, Adulation, And Orgiastic Triumph. In Other Words It Is Necessary That He Should Have The Mentality Appropriate To A State Of War. It Does Not Matter Whether The War Is Actually Happening, And, Since No Decisive Victory Is Possible, It Does Not Matter Whether The War Is Going Well Or Badly. All That Is Needed Is That A State Of War Should Exist.

If You Have No Money, Men Won't Care For You, Women Won't Love You; Won't, That Is, Care For You Or Love You The Last Little Bit That Matters.

No Advance In Wealth, No Softening Of Manners, No Reform Or Revolution Has Ever Brought Human Equality A Millimeter Nearer.

If It Is Possible To Cut A Word Out, Always Cut It Out

Figures Of Speech

There Were Sins That Were Too Subtle To Be Explained, And There Were Others That Were Too Terrible To Be Clearly Mentioned. For Example, There Was Sex, Which Was Always Smouldering Just Under The Surface And Which Suddenly Blew Up Into A Tremendous Row When I Was About Twelve.

Roughly Speaking, The More One Pays For Food, The More Sweat And Spittle One Is Obliged To Eat With It.... Dirtiness Is Inherent In Hotels And Restaurants, Because Sound Food Is Sacrificed To Punctuality And Smartness.

Records Told The Same Tale, Then The Lie Passed Into History And Became Truth.

Confession Is Not Betrayal. What You Say Or Do Doesn't Matter; Only Feelings Matter. If They Could Make Me Stop Loving You-that Would Be The Real Betrayal.

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

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.

The Tendency Of Advanced Capitalism Has Been To Enlarge The Middle Class And Not To Wipe It Out, As It Once Seemed Likely To Do.

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.

By ' Patriotism ' I Mean Devotion To A Particular Place And A Particular Way Of Life , Which One Believes To Be The Best In The World But Has No Wish To Force On Other People.

The Whole Climate Of Thought Will Be Different. In Fact There Will Be No Thought, As We Understand It Now. Orthodoxy Means Not Thinking - Not Needing To Think. Orthodoxy Is Unconsciousness.

Of Pain You Could Wish Only One Thing: That It Should Stop. Nothing In The World Was So Bad As Physical Pain. In The Face Of Pain There Are No Heroes.

Sooner Or Later A False Belief Bumps Up Against Solid Reality, Usually On A Battlefield.

The Nationalist Not Only Does Not Disapprove Of Atrocities Committed By His Own Side, But He Has A Remarkable Capacity For Not Even Hearing About Them.

Political Language

Atrocities Committed

The More Men You've Had, The More I Love You.

Apparently Nothing Will Ever Teach These People That The Other 99 % Of The Population Exist.

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.

Journalism Is Printing What Someone Else Does Not Want Printed: Everything Else Is Public Relations.

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.

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.

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

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

Most Revolutionaries Are Potential Tories, Because They Imagine That Everything Can Be Put Right By Altering The Shape Of Society; Once That Change Is Effected, As It Sometimes Is, They See No Need For Any Other.

The Plant Is Blind But It Knows Enough To Keep Pushing Upwards Towards The Light, And It Will Continue To Do This In The Face Of Endless Discouragements.

Until One Has Some Kind Of Professional Relationship With Books, One Does Not Discover How Bad The Majority Of Them Are.

I Do Not Think One Can Assess A Writer's Motives Without Knowing Something Of His Early Development. His Subject Matter Will Be Determined By The Age He Lives In ... But Before He Ever Begins To Write He Will Have Acquired An Emotional Attitude From Which He Will Never Completely Escape.

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

Thinking Person

It Was Not The Man's Brain That Was Speaking; It Was His Larynx.

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

Why Should Be Fruit Be Held Inferior To The Flower?

There Exists A Huge Dump Of Worn-out Metaphors Which Have Lost All Evocative Power And Are Merely Used Because They Save People The Trouble Of Inventing Phrases For Themselves.

The Object Of Terrorism Is Terrorism. The Object Of Oppression Is Oppression. The Object Of Torture Is Torture. The Object Of Murder Is Murder. The Object Of Power Is Power. Now Do You Begin To Understand Me?

Until They Became Conscious They Will Never Rebel, And Until After They Have Rebelled They Cannot Become Conscious.

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.

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?

Let's Face It: Our Lives Are Miserable, Laborious, And Short.

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

[a] World In Which It Is Wrong To Murder An Individual Civilian And Right To Drop A Thousand Tons Of High Explosive On A Residential Area Does Sometimes Make Me Wonder Whether This Earth Of Ours Is Not A Loony Bin Made Use Of By Some Other Planet. Not To Have A National Anthem Would Be Logical.

Patriotism Has Nothing To Do With Conservatism. It Is Actually The Opposite Of Conservatism, Since It Is A Devotion To Something That Is Always Changing And Yet Is Felt To Be Mystically The Same.

Take Pleasure In The Impact Of One Sound On Another.

One Must Choose Between God And Man, And All "radicals" And "progressives", From The Mildest Liberal To The Most Extreme Anarchist, Have In Effect Chosen Man.

Saints Should Always Be Judged Guilty Until They Are Proved Innocent.

No Animal Shall Kill Any Other Animal Without Cause.

Napoleon Is Always Right.

Whoever Controls The Image And Information Of The Past Determines What And How Future Generations Will Think; Whoever Controls The Information And Images Of The Present Determines How Those Same People Will View The Past." "he Who Controls The Past Commands The Future. He Who Commands The Future Conquers The Past.

I Enjoy Talking To You. Your Mind Appeals To Me. It Resembles My Own Mind Except That You Happen To Be Insane.

Money, Money, All Is Money! Could You Write Even A Penny Novelette Without Money To Put Heart In You?

He Thought With A Kind Of Astonishment Of The Biological Uselessness Of Pain And Fear, The Treachery Of The Human Body Which Always Freezes Into Inertia At Exactly The Moment When A Special Effort Is Needed.

If There Really Is Such A Thing As Turning In One's Grave, Shakespeare Must Get A Lot Of Exercise.

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

And It Is A Great Thing To Die In Your Own Bed, Though It Is Better Still To Die In Your Boots.

Circus Dogs Jump When The Trainer Cracks His Whip.

Man's Greatest Drive Is Not Love Or Hate But To Change Another Person's Writing.

The Quickest Way Of Ending A War Is To Lose It.

A Tragic Situation Exists Precisely When Virtue Does Not Triumph But When It Is Still Felt That Man Is Nobler Than The Forces Which Destroy Him.

The Major Problem Of Our Time Is The Decay In The Belief In Personal Immortality, And It Cannot Be Dealt With While The Average Human Being Is Either Drudging Like An Ox Or Shivering In Fear Of The Secret Police... How Right [the Working Classes] Are To Realize That The Belly Comes Before The Soul, Not In The Scale Of Values But In Point Of Time!

The Enemies Of Intellectual Liberty Always Try To Present Their Case As A Plea For Discipline Versus Individualism. The Issue Truth-versus-untruth Is As Far As Possible Kept In The Background.

If He Thinks He Floats Off The Floor, And If I Simultaneously Think I See Him Do It, Then The Thing Happens.

The Party Told You To Reject The Evidence Of Your Eyes And Ears. It Was Their Final, Most Essential Command. His Heart Sank As He Thought Of The Enormous Power Arrayed Against Him, The Ease With Which Any Party Intellectual Would Overthrow Him In Debate, The Subtle Arguments Which He Would Not Be Able To Understand, Much Less Answer. And Yet He Was In The Right! They Were Wrong And He Was Right.

The Fact Is That Every War Suffers A Kind Of Progressive Degradation With Every Month That It Continues, Because Such Things As Individual Liberty And A Truthful Press Are Simply Not Compatible With Military Efficiency.

Real Power Is Achieved When The Ruling Class Controls The Material Essentials Of Life, Granting And Withholding Them From The Masses As If They Were Privileges.

Almost As Swiftly As He Had Imagined It, She Had Torn Her Clothes Off, And When She Flung Them Aside It Was With That Same Magnificent Gesture By Which A Whole Civilization Seemed To Be Annihilated.

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

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

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

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

All The Papers That Matter Live Off Their Advertisements, And The Advertisers Exercise An Indirect Censorship Over News.

A Dirty Joke Is Not, Of Course, A Serious Attack On Morality, But It Is A Sort Of Mental Rebellion, A Momentary Wish That Things Were Otherwise.

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

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

When The White Man Turns Tyrant, It Is His Own Freedom That He Destroys

All The War-propaganda, All The Screaming And Lies And Hatred, Comes Invariably From People Who Are Not Fighting.

For, When You Are Approaching Poverty, You Make One Discovery Which Outweighs Some Of The Others. You Discover Boredom And Mean Complications And The Beginnings Of Hunger, But You Also Discover The Great Redeeming Feature Of Poverty: The Fact That It Annihilates The Future. Within Certain Limits, It Is Actually True That The Less Money You Have, The Less You Worry.

But The Thought Of Being A Lunatic Did Not Greatly Trouble Him; The Horror Was That He Might Also Be Wrong.

You Will Be Hollow. We Shall Squeeze You Empty, And Then We Shall Fill You With Ourselves.

Each Generation Imagines Itself To Be More Intelligent Than The One That Went Before It, And Wiser Than The One That Comes After It.

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

Has It Ever Occurred To You,' He Said, 'that The Whole History Of English Poetry Has Been De-termined By The Fact That The English Language Lacks Rhymes?

How Right The Working Classes Are In Their "materialism." How Right They Are To Realize That The Belly Comes Before The Soul, Not In The Scale Of Values But In Point Of Time!

Lack Of Money Means Discomfort, Means Squalid Worries, Means Shortage Of Tobacco, Means Ever-present Consciousness Of Failure-above All, It Means Loneliness.

The Moralist And The Revolutionary Are Constantly Undermining One Another. Marx Exploded A Hundred Tons Of Dynamite Beneath The Moralist Position, And We Are Still Living In The Echo Of That Tremendous Crash. But Already, Somewhere Or Other, The Sappers Are At Work And Fresh Dynamite Is Being Tamped In Place To Blow Marx At The Moon. Then Marx, Or Somebody Like Him, Will Come Back With Yet More Dynamite, And So The Process Continues, To An End We Cannot Foresee.

Man Is The Only Creature That Consumes Without Producing. He Does Not Give Milk, He Does Not Lay Eggs, He Is Too Weak To Pull The Plough, He Cannot Run Fast Enough To Catch Rabbits. Yet He Is Lord Of All The Animals.

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

One Of The Effects Of A Safe And Civilized Life Is An Immense Over Sensitiveness Which Makes All The Primary Emotions Somewhat Disgusting.

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.

Truth Becomes Untruth If Uttered By Your Enemy

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

It Reminded Us That Propaganda In Some Form Or Other Lurks In Every Book, That Every Work Of Art Has A Meaning And A Purpose - A Political, Social And Religious Purpose - That Our Aesthetic Judgements Are Always Coloured By Our Prejudices And Beliefs

Nothing Holds It Together Except An Idea Which Is Indestructible.

To Accept An Unorthodoxy Is Always To Inherit Unresolved Contradictions

A Scrupulous Writer In Every Sentence That He Writes Will Ask Himself. . . What Am I Trying To Say? What Words Will Express It?...and He Probably Asks Himself. . . Could I Put It More Shortly? But You Are Not Obliged To Go To All This Trouble. You Can Shirk It By Simply Throwing Open Your Mind And Letting The Ready-made Phrases Come Crowding In. They Will Construct Your Sentences For You

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.

England Is The Most Class-ridden Country Under The Sun. It Is A Land Of Snobbery And Privilege, Ruled Largely By The Old And Silly.

When One Watches Some Tired Hack On The Platform Mechanically Repeating The Familiar Phrases - Bestial Atrocities, Iron Heel, Blood-stained Tyranny, Free Peoples Of The World, Stand Shoulder To Shoulder - One Often Has A Curious Feeling That One Is Not Watching A Live Human Being But Some Kind Of Dummy, The Appropriate Noises Are Coming Out Of His Larynx, But His Brain Is Not Involved

A Scrupulous Writer, In Every Sentence That He Writes, Will Ask Himself At Least Four Questions, Thus: 1. What Am I Trying To Say? 2. What Words Will Express It? 3. What Image Or Idiom Will Make It Clearer? 4. Is This Image Fresh Enough To Have An Effect?

Political Language

It Is The Same In All Wars; The Soldiers Do The Fighting, The Journalists Do The Shouting, And No True Patriot Ever Gets Near A Front-line Trench, Except On The Briefest Of Propaganda Tours.

Do You Begin To See, Then, What Kind Of World We Are Creating? It Is The Exact Opposite Of The Stupid Hedonistic Utopias That The Old Reformers Imagined. A World Of Fear And Treachery And Torment, A World Of Trampling And Being Trampled Upon, A World Which Will Grow Not Less But More Merciless As It Refines Itself. Progress In Our World Will Be Progress Toward More Pain.

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

Even Through The Shut Window Pane, The World Looked Cold.

One Can Love A Child, Perhaps, More Deeply Than One Can Love Another Adult, But It Is Rash To Assume That The Child Feels Any Love In Return.

A Socialist United States Of Europe Seems To Me The Only Worth-while Political Objective Today

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.

Windmill Or No Windmill, He Said, Life Would Go On As It Had Always Gone On--that Is, Badly.

He Was A Lonely Ghost Uttering A Truth That Nobody Would Ever Hear.

But What Is Work And What Is Not Work? Is It Work To Dig, To Carpenter, To Plant Trees, To Fell Trees, To Ride, To Fish, To Hunt, To Feed Chickens, To Play The Piano, To Take Photographs, To Build A House, To Cook, To Sew, To Trim Hats, To Mend Motor Bicycles? All Of These Things Are Work To Somebody, And All Of Them Are Play To Somebody. There Are In Fact Very Few Activities Which Cannot Be Classed Either As Work Or Play According As You Choose To Regard Them.

We Believe Half-instinctively That Evil Always Defeats Itself In The Long Run. Pacifism Is Founded Largely On This Belief. Don't Resist Evil, And It Will Somehow Destroy Itself. But Why Should It? What Evidence Is There That It Does... Unless Conquered From The Outside By Military Force?

We Of The Sinking Middle Class May Sink Without Further Struggles Into The Working Class Where We Belong, And Probably When We Get There It Will Not Be So Dreadful As We Feared, For, After All, We Have Nothing To Lose.

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

Million Dollars

[...] You Can Get Anything In This World If You Genuinely Don't Want It.

Now He Had Recognized Himself As A Dead Man It Became Important To Stay Alive As Long As Possible.

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?

Most People Get A Fair Amount Of Fun Out Of Their Lives, But On Balance Life Is Suffering, And Only The Very Young Or The Very Foolish Imagine Otherwise.

World Suffering

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

Day By Day And Almost Minute By Minute The Past Was Brought Up To Date. In This Way Every Prediction Made By The Party Could Be Shown By Documentary Evidence To Have Been Correct; Nor Was Any Item Of News, Or Any Expression Of Opinion, Which Conflicted With The Needs Of The Moment, Ever Allowed To Remain On Record. All History Was A Palimpsest, Scraped Clean And Reinscribed Exactly As Often As Was Necessary.

In The Face Of Pain There Are No Heroes.

Manchester Is The Belly And Guts Of The Nation

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

You Can't Live Life Without Consequences. They Occur Regardless Of The Decision. A Consequence Is An Outcome, Good Or Bad. You Can Live Life Without Regrets And Thats What Makes It Worth It. Or You Could Live With Regret And End Up Hanging Yourself But Thats Still Good. You Paid For The Rope So Your Feeding Someones Family. Something To Be Proud Of Before You Kick The Bucket

Early In Life I Had Noticed That No Event Is Ever Correctly Reported In A Newspaper.

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

In Any Form Of Art Designed To Appeal To Large Numbers Of People,...[t]he Rich Man Is Usually 'bad', And His Machinations Are Invariably Frustrated.:; 'good Poor Man Defeats Bad Rich Man' Is An Accepted Formula.

It Is A Mysterious Thing, The Loss Of Faith-as Mysterious As Faith Itself. Like Faith, It Is Ultimately Not Rooted In Logic; It Is A Change In The Climate Of The Mind.

Mysterious Things

Despotic Governments Can Stand 'moral Force' Till The Cows Come Home; What They Fear Is Physical Force.

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.

Never Use A Long Word Where A Short One Will Do.

The Past Is Whatever The Records And The Memories Agree Upon.

All Writers Are Vain, Selfish And Lazy, And At The Very Bottom Of Their Motives Lies A Mystery.

The Prime Necessities For Success In Life Are Money, Athleticism, Tailor Made Clothes And A Charming Smile.

In Our Time, Political Speech And Writing Are Largely The Defense Of The Indefensible. Things Like The Continuance Of British Rule In India, The Russian Purges And Deportations, The Dropping Of The Atom Bombs On Japan, Can Indeed Be Defended, But Only By Arguments Which Are Too Brutal For Most People To Face, And Which Do Not Square With The Professed Aims Of The Political Parties. Thus Political Language Has To Consist Largely Of Euphemism, Question-begging And Sheer Cloudy Vagueness.

A Family With The Wrong Members In Control; That, Perhaps, Is As Near As One Can Come To Describing England In A Phrase.

The Essence Of Being Human Is That One Does Not Seek Perfection, That One Is Sometimes Willing To Commit Sins For The Sake Of Loyalty, That One Does Not Push Asceticism To The Point Where It Makes Friendly Intercourse Impossible, And That One Is Prepared In The End To Be Defeated And Broken Up By Life, Which Is The Inevitable Price Of Fastening One's Love Upon Other Human Individuals.

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. He Is Struggling Against Vagueness, Against Obscurity, Against The Lure Of The Decorative Adjective, Against The Encroachment Of Latin And Greek, And, Above All, Against The Worn-out Phrases And Dead Metaphors With Which The Language Is Cluttered Up.

There Was Of Course No Way Of Knowing Whether You Were Being Watched At Any Given Moment. How Often, Or On What System, The Thought Police Plugged In On Any Individual Wire Was Guesswork. It Was Even Conceivable That They Watched Everybody All The Time. But At Any Rate They Could Plug In Your Wire Whenever They Wanted To. You Had To Live-did Live, From Habit That Became Instinct-in The Assumption That Every Sound You Made Was Overheard, And, Except In Darkness, Every Movement Scrutinized.

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 You Loved Someone, You Loved Him, And When You Had Nothing Else To Give, You Still Gave Him Love.

It Is A Feeling Of Relief, Almost Of Pleasure, At Knowing Yourself At Last Genuinely Down And Out. You Have Talked So Often Of Going To The Dogs - And Well, Here Are The Dogs, And You Have Reached Them, And You Can Stand It. It Takes Off A Lot Of Anxiety.

When You Make Love You're Using Up Energy; And Afterwards You Feel Happy And Don't Give A Damn For Anything. They Can't Bear You To Feel Like That. They Want You To Be Bursting With Energy All The Time. All This Marching Up And Down And Cheering And Waving Flags Is Simply Sex Gone Sour. If You're Happy Inside Yourself, Why Should You Get Excited About Big Brother And The Three-year Plans And The Two Minutes Hate And All The Rest Of Their Bloody Rot?

A Society Becomes Totalitarian When Its Structure Becomes Flagrantly Artificial: That Is, When Its Ruling Class Has Lost Its Function But Succeeds In Clinging To Power By Force Or Fraud.

Objective Truth

Sanity Is Not Statistical.

Lastly, Tea--unless One Is Drinking It In The Russian Style--should Be Drunk Without Sugar. I Know Very Well That I Am In A Minority Here. But Still, How Can You Call Yourself A True Tea-lover If You Destroy The Flavour Of Your Tea By Putting Sugar In It? It Would Be Equally Reasonable To Put In Pepper Or Salt. Tea Is Meant To Be Bitter, Just As Beer Is Meant To Be Bitter. If You Sweeten It, You Are No Longer Tasting The Tea, You Are Merely Tasting The Sugar; You Could Make A Very Similar Drink By Dissolving Sugar In Plain Hot Water.

No Man Should Be Allowed To Be The President Who Does Not Understand Hogs, Or Hasn't Been Around A Manure Pile.

Serious Sport Is War Minus The Shooting.

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.

Power Is Not A Means; It Is An End.

The Choice Before Human Beings, Is Not, As A Rule , Between Good And Evil But Between Two Evils. You Can Let The Nazis Rule The World : That Is Evil; Or You Can Overthrow Them By War , Which Is Also Evil. There Is No Other Choice Before You, And Whichever You Choose You Will Not Come Out With Clean Hands.

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.

It Had Become Usual To Give Napoleon The Credit For Every Successful Achievement And Every Stroke Of Good Fortune. You Would Often Hear One Hen Remark To Another, "under The Guidance Of Our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I Have Laid Five Eggs In Six Days" Or Two Cows, Enjoying A Drink At The Pool, Would Exclaim, "thanks To The Leadership Of Comrade Napoleon, How Excellent This Water Tastes!".

I Loathed The Game, And Since I Could See No Pleasure Or Usefulness In It, It Was Very Difficult For Me To Show Courage At It. Football, It Seemed To Me, Is Not Really Played For The Pleasure Of Kicking A Ball About, But Is A Species Of Fighting.

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

Take Away Freedom Of Speech, And The Creative Faculties Dry Up.

Freedom Of Speech

The Citizen Of Oceania Is Not Allowed To Know Anything Of The Tenets Of The Other Two Philosophies, But He Is Taught To Execrate Them As Barbarous Outrages Upon Morality And Common Sense. Actually, The Three Philosophies Are Barely Distinguishable.

If There Is Hope, It Lies In The Proles.

In Our Time, Political Speech And Writing Are Largely The Defense Of The Indefensible... Thus, Political Language Has To Consist Largely Of Euphemism, Question-begging, And Sheer Cloudy Vagueness... Political Language [is] Designed To Make Lies Sound Truthful And Murder Respectable.

Political Language

The Typical Socialist... A Prim Little Man With A White-collar Job, Usually A Secret Teetotaler And Often With Vegetarian Leanings.

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.

Politically, Swift Was One Of Those People Who Are Driven Into A Sort Of Perverse Toryism By The Follies Of The Progressive Party Of The Moment.

I Am Well Acquainted With All The Arguments Against Freedom Of Thought And Speech - The Arguments Which Claim That It Cannot Exist, And The Arguments Which Claim That It Ought Not To. I Answer Simply That They Don't Convince Me And That Our Civilization Over A Period Of Four Hundred Years Has Been Founded On The Opposite Notice.

Man Is The Only Creature That Consumes Without Producing

Hunger Reduces One To An Utterly Spineless, Brainless Condition, More Like The After-effects Of Influenza Than Anything Else. It Is As Though All One's Blood Had Been Pumped Out And Lukewarm Water Substituted.

The Catholic And The Communist Are Alike In Assuming That An Opponent Cannot Be Both Honest And Intelligent.

That Rifle Hanging On The Wall Of The Working-class Flat Or Labourer's Cottage Is The Symbol Of Democracy. It Is Our Job To See That It Stays There.

Beauty Is Meaningless Until It Is Shared.

There Is No Swifter Route To The Corruption Of Thought Than Through The Corruption Of Language

When The White Man Turns Tyrant It Is His Own Freedom That He Destroys.he Becomes A Sort Of Hollow,posing Dummy,the Conventional Figure Of A Sahib.for It Is The Condition Of His Rule That He Shall Spend His Life In Trying To Impress The "natives",and So In Every Crisis He Has Got To Do What The "natives" Expect Of Him.he Wears A Mask And His Face Grows To Fit It.

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