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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.

-George Orwell

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All That Was Required

George Orwell

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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.

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Do You Remember Writing In Your Diary," He Said, "that It Did Not Matter Whether I Was A Friend Or An Enemy, Since I Was At Least A Person Who Understood You And Could Be Talked To? You Were Right. I Enjoy Talking To You. Your Mind Appeals To Me. It Resembles My Own Mind Except That You Happen To Be Insane.

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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.

Fate Seemed To Be Playing A Series Of Extraordinarily Unamusing Jokes.

A Plongeur Is A Slave, And A Wasted Slave, Doing Stupid And Largely Unnecessary Work. He Is Kept At Work, Ultimately, Because Of A Vague Feeling That He Would Be Dangerous If He Had Leisure. And Educated People, Who Should Be On His Side, Acquiesce In The Process, Because They Know Nothing About Him And Consequently Are Afraid Of Him.

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.

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We Were Once Told That The Aeroplane Had "abolished Frontiers"; Actually It Is Only Since The Aeroplane Became A Serious Weapon That Frontiers Have Become Definitely Impassable.

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One Defeats A Fanatic Precisely By Not Being A Fanatic Oneself, But On The Contrary By Using One's Intelligence.

He Felt As Though He Were Wandering In The Forests Of The Sea Bottom, Lost In A Monstrous World Where He Himself Was The Monster. He Was Alone. The Past Was Dead, The Future Was Unimaginable

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Who Controls The Past Controls The Future. Who Controls The Present Controls The Past.

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The Four Great Motives For Writing Prose Are Sheer Egoism, Esthetic Enthusiasm, Historical Impulse, And Political Purpose.

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If You Turn The Other Cheek, You Will Get A Harder Blow On It Than You Got On The First One. This Does Not Always Happen, But It Is To Be Expected, And You Ought Not To Complain If It Does Happen.

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

We Have Sunk So Low It Has Become The Obligation Of Every Decent, Thinking Individual To Re-state The Obvious!

You Believe That Reality Is Something Objective, External, Existing In Its Own Right. You Also Believe That The Nature Of Reality Is Self-evident. When You Delude Yourself Into Thinking That You See Something, You Assume That Everyone Else Sees The Same Thing As You. But I Tell You, Winston, That Reality Exists In The Human Mind, And Nowhere Else. Not In The Individual Mind, Which Can Make Mistakes, And In Any Case Soon Perishes: Only In The Mind Of The Paty, Which Is Collective And Immortal.

All Political Thinking For Years Past Has Been Vitiated In The Same Way. People Can Foresee The Future Only When It Coincides With Their Own Wishes, And The Most Grossly Obvious Facts Can Be Ignored When They Are Unwelcome.

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Using Clichés Is A Substitute For Thinking

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

Under The Spreading Chestnut Tree I Sold You And You Sold Me: There Lie They, And Here Lie We Under The Spreading Chestnut Tree.

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.

...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.

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So Long As Human Beings Stay Human, Death And Life Are The Same Thing.

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[you Write Out Of The] Desire To Seem Clever, To Be Talked About, To Be Remembered After Death, Etc., Etc., Etc. It Is Humbug To Pretend This Is Not A Motive And A Strong One.

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

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.

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.

And Yet, Just For A Moment, What Almost Frightening Power Had Sounded In That Cry From Only A Few Hundred Throats! Why Was It That They Could Never Shout Like That About Anything That Mattered?

Sanity Was Statistical. It Was Merely A Question Of Learning To Think As They Thought.

The Most Effective Way To Destroy People Is To Deny And Obliterate Their Own Understanding Of Their History.

Manchester Is The Belly And Guts Of The Nation

Modern Writing At Its Worst Does Not Consist In Picking Out Words For The Sake Of Their Meaning And Inventing Images In Order To Make The Meaning Clearer. It Consists In Gumming Together Long Strips Of Words Which Have Already Been Set In Order By Someone Else, And Making The Results Presentable By Sheer Humbug. The Attraction Of This Way Of Writing Is That It Is Easy.

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.

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.

And In The General Hardening Of Outlook That Set In ... Practices Which Had Been Long Abandoned ... -- Imprisonment Without Trial, The Use Of War Prisoners As Slaves, Public Executions, Torture To Extract Confessions, The Use Of Hostages And The Deportation Of Whole Populations -- Not Only Became Common Again, But Were Tolerated And Even Defended By People Who Considered Themselves Enlightened And Progressive.

A Humanitarian Is Always A Hypocrite.

There Were Times When The Fact Of Impending Death Seemed As Palpable As The Bed They Lay On, And They Would Cling Together With A Sort Of Despairing Sensuality, Like A Damned Soul Grasping At His Last Morsel Of Pleasure When The Clock Is Within Five Minutes Of Striking. But There Were Also Times When They Had The Illusion Not Only Of Safety But Of Permanence.

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad.

As With The Christian Religion, The Worst Advertisement For Socialism Is Its Adherents.

It Was Terribly Dangerous To Let Your Thoughts Wander When You Were In Any Public Place Or Within Range Of A Telescreen. The Smallest Thing Could Give You Away. A Nervous Tic, An Unconscious Look Of Anxiety, A Habit Of Muttering To Yourself-anything That Carried With It The Suggestion Of Abnormality, Of Having Something To Hide. In Any Case, To Wear An Improper Expression On Your Face ... Was Itself A Punishable Offense. There Was Even A Word For It In Newspeak: Facecrime.

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.

After 40, A Man Is Responsible For His Face.

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.

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.

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

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!".

One Sometimes Gets The Impression That The Mere Words ' Socialism ' And ' Communism ' Draw Towards Them With Magnetic Force Every Fruit-juice Drinker, Nudist, Sandal-wearer, Sex-maniac, Quaker, 'nature Cure' Quack, Pacifist, And Feminist In England.

Scientific Education For The Masses Will Do Little Good, And Probably A Lot Of Harm, If It Simply Boils Down To More Physics, More Chemistry, More Biology, Etc To The Detriment Of Literature And History. Its Probable Effect On The Average Human Being Would Be To Narrow The Range Of His Thoughts And Make Him More Than Ever Contemptuous Of Such Knowledge As He Did Not Possess.

History Has To Move In A Certain Direction, Even If It Has To Be Pushed That Way By Neurotics.

Reality Is Inside The Skull.

But The Problems Of Perpetuating A Hierarchical Society Go Deeper Than This. There Are Only Four Ways In Which A Ruling Group Can Fall From Power. Either It Is Conquered From Without, Or It Governs So Inefficiently That The Masses Are Stirred To Revolt, Or It Allows A Strong And Discontented Middle Group To Come Into Being, Or It Loses Its Own Self-confidence And Willingness To Govern.

Self Confidence

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

There Are Some Situations From Which One Can Only Escape By Acting Like A Devil Or A Lunatic.

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

The Totalitarian States Can Do Great Things, But There Is One Thing They Cannot Do: They Cannot Give The Factory-worker A Rifle And Tell Him To Take It Home And Keep It In His Bedroom. That Rifle, Hanging On The Wall Of The Working-class Flat Or Laborer's Cottage, Is The Symbol Of Democracy. It Is Our Job To See That It Stays There.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

To Die Hating Them, That Was Freedom.

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.

We Shall Meet In The Place Where There Is No Darkness.

Facts, At Any Rate, Could Not Be Kept Hidden. They Could Be Tracked Down By Inquiry, They Could Be Squeezed Out Of You By Torture. But If The Object Was Not To Stay Alive But To Stay Human, What Difference Did It Ultimately Make? They Could Not Alter Your Feelings, For That Matter You Could Not Alter Them Yourself, Even If You Wanted To. They Could Lay Bare In The Utmost Detail Everything That You Had Done Or Said Or Thought; But The Inner Heart, Whose Workings Were Mysterious Even To Yourself, Remained Impregnable.

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

He Was An Embittered Atheist, The Sort Of Atheist Who Does Not So Much Disbelieve In God As Personally Dislike Him.

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.

When I Sit Down To Write A Book, I Do Not Say To Myself, 'i Am Going To Produce A Work Of Art.' I Write It Because There Is Some Lie That I Want To Expose, Some Fact To Which I Want To Draw Attention, And My Initial Concern Is To Get A Hearing.

The Human Beings Did Not Hate Animal Farm Any Less Now That It Was Prospering; Indeed, They Hated It More Than Ever.

We Are The Dead. Our Only True Life Is In The Future. We Shall Take Part In It As Handfuls Of Dust And Splinters Of Bone. But How Far Away That Future May Be, There Is No Knowing.

Serious Sport Is War Minus The Shooting.

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.

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.

Totalitarianism, If Not Fought Against, Could Triumph Anywhere.

Political Language... Is Designed To Make Lies Sound Truthful And Murder Respectable, And To Give An Appearance Of Solidity To Pure Wind.

If Publishers And Editors Exert Themselves To Keep Certain Topics Out Of Print, It Is Not Because They Are Frightened Of Prosecution But Because They Are Frightened Of Public Opinion. In This Country Intellectual Cowardice Is The Worst Enemy A Writer Or Journalist Has To Face, And That Fact Does Not Seem To Me To Have Had The Discussion It Deserves.

Probably The Best Nonsense Poetry Is Produced Gradually And Accidentally, By Communities Rather Than By Individuals.

Part Of The Reason For The Ugliness Of Adults, In A Child's Eyes, Is That The Child Is Usually Looking Upwards, And Few Faces Are At Their Best When Seen From Below.

I'm Fat, But I'm Thin Inside... There's A Thin Man Inside Every Fat Man.

Last Of All Came The Cat, Who Looked Round, As Usual, For The Warmest Place, And Finally Squeezed Herself In Between Boxer And Clover; There She Purred Contentedly Throughout Major's Speech Without Listening To A Word Of What He Was Saying.

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

Modern English, Especially Written English, Is Full Of Bad Habits Which Spread By Imitation And Which Can Be Avoided If One Is Willing To Take The Necessary Trouble.

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.

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.

The Object Of Power Is Power.

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.

The Great Enemy Of Clear Language Is Insincerity.

He [gandhi] Was Not One Of Those Saints Who Are Marked Out By Their Phenomenal Piety From Childhood Onwards, Nor One Of The Other Kind Who Forsake The World After Sensational Debaucheries.

Cricket Is A Game Full Or Forlorn Hopes And Sudden Dramatic Changes Of Fortune And Its Rules Are So Ill-defined That Their Interpretation Is Partly An Ethical Business.

The Creatures Outside Looked From Pig To Man, And From Man To Pig, And From Pig To Man Again; But Already It Was Impossible To Say Which Was Which.

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

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

Keeping Secrets

Under The Spreading Chestnut Tree I Sold You And You Sold Me--

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

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

Political Language

In A Time Of Universal Deceit - Telling The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act.

I Often Wondered Whether Any Of The Others Grasped That I Had Done It Solely To Avoid Looking A Fool.

Probably The Battle Of Waterloo Was Won On The Playing-fields Of Eton, But The Opening Battles Of All Subsequent Wars Have Been Lost There.

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.

I Always Disagree, However, When People End Up Saying That We Can Only Combat Communism, Fascism Or What Not If We Develop An Equal Fanaticism. It Appears To Me That One Defeats The Fanatic Precisely By Not Being A Fanatic Oneself, But On The Contrary By Using One's Intelligence.

Men Can Only Be Happy When They Do Not Assume That The Object Of Life Is Happiness.

Advertising Is The Rattling Of A Stick Inside A Swill Bucket.

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

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

I Do Not Wish To Comment On The Work; If It Does Not Speak For Itself, It Is A Failure.

It's Not So Much Staying Alive, It's Staying Human That's Important. What Counts Is That We Don't Betray Each Other.

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

Political Chaos Is Connected With The Decay Of Language... One Can Probably Bring About Some Improvement By Starting At The Verbal End.

Political Language

The Men Who Were Well Enough To Stand Had Moved Across The Carriage To Cheer The Italians As They Went Past. A Crutch Waved Out Of The Window; Bandaged Forearms Made The Red Salute. It Was Like An Allegorical Picture Of War; The Trainload Of Fresh Men Gliding Proudly Up The Line, The Maimed Men Sliding Slowly Down, And All The While The Guns On The Open Trucks Making One's Heart Leap As Guns Always Do, And Reviving That Pernicious Feeling, So Difficult To Get Rid Of, That War *is* Glorious After All.

Within Any Important Issue, There Are Always Aspects No One Wishes To Discuss.

On The Whole, Human Beings Want To Be Good, But Not Too Good, And Not Quite All The Time.

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

My Best Fishing-memory Is About Some Fish That I Never Caught.

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'

War Is A Way Of Shattering To Pieces... Materials Which Might Otherwise Be Used To Make The Masses Too Comfortable And... Too Intelligent.

[what Hayek] Does Not See, Or Will Not Admit, [is] That A Return To "free" Competition Means For The Great Mass Of People A Tyranny Probably Worse, Because More Irresponsible, Than That Of The State. The Trouble With Competitions Is That Somebody Wins Them. Professor Hayek Denies That Free Capitalism Necessarily Leads To Monopoly, But In Practice That Is Where It Has Led, And Since The Vast Majority Of People Would Far Rather Have State Regimentation Than Slumps And Unemployment, The Drift Towards Collectivism Is Bound To Continue If Popular Opinion Has Any Say In The Matter.

In A Society In Which There Is No Law, And In Theory No Compulsion, The Only Arbiter Of Behaviour Is Public Opinion. But Public Opinion, Because Of The Tremendous Urge To Conformity In Gregarious Animals, Is Less Tolerant Than Any System Of Law. When Human Beings Are Governed By "thou Shalt Not", The Individual Can Practise A Certain Amount Of Eccentricity: When They Are Supposedly Governed By "love" Or "reason", He Is Under Continuous Pressure To Make Him Behave And Think In Exactly The Same Way As Everyone Else.

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

No One, At Any Rate No English Writer, Has Written Better About Childhood Than Dickens. In Spite Of All The Knowledge That Has Accumulated Since, In Spite Of The Fact That Children Are Now Comparatively Sanely Treated, No Novelist Has Shown The Same Power Of Entering Into The Child's Point Of View.

If He Were Allowed Contact With Foreigners He Would Discover That They Are Creatures Similar To Himself And That Most Of What He Has Been Told About Them Is Lies. The Sealed World In Which He Lives Would Be Broken, And The Fear, Hatred And Self-righteousness On Which His Morale Depends Might Evaporate.

People Invent New Machines And Improve Existing Ones Almost Unconsciously, Rather As A Somnambulist Will Go Walking In His Sleep. The Interesting Puzzle In Our Times Is That We So Willingly Sleepwalk Through The Process Of Reconstituting The Conditions Of Human Existence.

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

The Result Of This Is That So-called Peace Propaganda Is Just As Dishonest And Intellectually Disgusting As War Propaganda. Like War Propaganda, It Concentrates On Putting Forward A ‘case’, Obscuring The Opponent’s Point Of View And Avoiding Awkward Questions.

If Liberty Means Anything At All, It Means The Right To Tell People What They Do Not Want To Hear.

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

The Ruling Power Is Always Faced With The Question, ‘in Such And Such Circumstances, What Would You Do?’, Whereas The Opposition Is Not Obliged To Take Responsibility Or Make Any Real Decisions.

Doublethink Means The Power Of Holding Two Contradictory Beliefs In One's Mind Simultaneously, And Accepting Both Of Them.

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

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

A Thing Which I Regret, And Which I Will Try To Remedy Some Time, Is That I Have Never In My Life Planted A Walnut. Nobody Does Plant Them Nowadays-when You See A Walnut It Is Almost Invariably An Old Tree. If You Plant A Walnut You Are Planting It For Your Grandchildren, And Who Cares A Damn For His Grandchildren?

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.

Stupidity Was As Necessary As Intelligence, And As Difficult To Attain.

Most People Approve Of Capital Punishment, But Most People Wouldn't Do The Hangman's Job.

From The Proletarians Nothing Is To Be Feared. Left To Themselves, They Will Continue From Generation To Generation And From Century To Century, Working, Breeding, And Dying, Not Only Without Any Impulse To Rebel, But Without The Power Of Grasping That The World Could Be Other Than It Is.

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.

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.

Freedom Is The Freedom To Say That Two Plus Two Make Four. If That Is Granted, All Else Follows.

The Only Thing For Which We Can Combine Is The Underlying Ideal Of Socialism; Justice And Liberty. But It Is Hardly Strong Enough To Call This Ideal Underlying. It Is Almost Completely Forgotten. It Has Been Buried Beneath Layer After Layer Of Doctnaire Priggishness, Party Squabbles And Half-backed Progressivism Until It Is Like A Diamond Hidden Under A Monition Of Dung. The Job Of The Socialist Is To Get It Out Again. Justice And Liberty! Those Are The Words That Have Got To Ring Like A Bugle Across The World.

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