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...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.

-George Orwell

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...in The Negative Part

George Orwell

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...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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From The Totalitarian Point Of View, History Is Something To Be Created Rather Than Learned.

International Football Is The Continuation Of War By Other Means.

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.

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.

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

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 Would Sooner Be A Foreigner In Spain Than In Most Countries. How Easy It Is To Make Friends In Spain!

The Essential Point Here Is That All People With Small, Insecure Incomes Are In The Same Boat And Ought To Be Fighting On The Same Side. Probably We Could Do With A Little Less Talk About' Capitalist' And 'proletarian' And A Little More About The Robbers And The Robbed.

Economic Inequality

Real Journalism Is Publishing Something That Somebody Else Does Not Want Published - The Rest Is Just Public Relations.

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

A Peace That Was Truly Permanent Would Be The Same As A Permanent War.

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.

It Is One Of The Tragedies Of The Half-educated That They Develop Late, When They Are Already Committed To Some Wrong Way Of Life.

What Can You Do Against The Lunatic Who Is More Intelligent Than Yourself, Who Gives Your Arguments A Fair Hearing And Then Simply Persists In His Lunacy?

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.

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

Napoleon Is Always Right.

Man Serves The Interests Of No Creature Except Himself.

Take Pleasure In The Impact Of One Sound On Another.

Sometimes They Threaten You With Something - Something You Can't Stand Up To, Can't Even Think About. And Then You Say, Don't Do It To Me, Do It To Somebody Else, Do It To So-and-so. And Perhaps You Might Pretend, Afterwards, That It Was Only A Trick And That You Just Said It To Make Them Stop And Didn't Mean It. But That Isn't True. At The Time When It Happens You Do Mean It. You Think There's No Other Way Of Saving Yourself, And You're Quite Ready To Save Yourself That Way. You Want It To Happen To The Other Person. You Don't Give A Damn What They Suffer. All You Care Is Yourself.

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 Party, Which Is Collective And Immortal.

The Whole Idea Of Revenge And Punishment Is A Childish Day-dream. Properly Speaking, There Is No Such Thing As Revenge. Revenge Is An Act Which You Want To Commit When You Are Powerless And Because You Are Powerless: As Soon As The Sense Of Impotence Is Removed, The Desire Evaporates Also.

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.

Good Novels Are Not Written By Orthodoxy-sniffers, Nor By People Who Are Conscience-stricken About Their Own Orthodoxy. Good Novels Are Written By People Who Are Not Frightened.

The Object Of Power Is Power.

I Felt As If I Was The Only Person Awake In A City Of Sleepwalkers. That's An Illusion, Of Course. When You Walk Through A Crowd Of Strangers It's Next Door To Impossible Not To Imagine That They're All Waxworks, But Probably They're Thinking Just The Same About You.

A Dirty Joke Is A Sort Of Mental Rebellion.

...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.

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

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.

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.

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

Freedom Of The Press

The End Was Contained In The Beginning.

We Know That No One Ever Seizes Power With The Intention Of Relinquishing It.

Dickens Is One Of Those Authors Who Are Well Worth Stealing.

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.

The Belly Comes Before The Soul.

It Was Given Out That The Animals There Practised Cannibalism, Tortured One Another With Red-hot Horseshoes, And Had Their Females In Common. This Was What Came Of Rebelling Against The Laws Of Nature, Frederick And Pilkington Said.

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?

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?

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

The Primary Aim Of Modern Warfare ... Is To Use Up The Products Of The Machine Without Raising The General Standard Of Living.

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

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

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.

For After All, What Is There Behind, Except Money? Money For The Right Kind Of Education, Money For Influential Friends, Money For Leisure And Peace Of Mind, Money For Trips To Italy. Money Writes Books, Money Sells Them. Give Me Not Righteousness, O Lord, Give Me Money, Only Money.

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.

Donkeys Live A Long Time. None Of You Has Ever Seen A Dead Donkey.

The Process [of Mass-media Deception] Has To Be Conscious, Or It Would Not Be Carried Out With Sufficient Precision, But It Also Has To Be Unconscious, Or It Would Bring With It A Feeling Of Falsity And Hence Of Guilt.... To Tell Deliberate Lies While Genuinely Believing In Them, To Forget Any Fact That Has Become Inconvenient, And Then, When It Becomes Necessary Again, To Draw It Back From Oblivion For Just So Long As It Is Needed, To Deny The Existence Of Objective Reality And All The While To Take Account Of The Reality Which One Denies All This Is Indispensably Necessary.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The People Will Believe What The Media Tells Them They Believe.

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.

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.

There Is No Test Of Literary Merit Except Survival, Which Is Itself An Index To Majority Opinion.

During Part Of 1941 And 1942, When The Luftwaffe Was Busy In Russia, The German Radio Regaled Its Home Audience With Stories Of Devastating Air Raids On London. Now, We Are Aware That Those Raids Did Not Happen. But What Use Would Our Knowledge Be If The Germans Conquered Britain? For The Purpose Of A Future Historian, Did Those Raids Happen, Or Didn't They? The Answer Is: If Hitler Survives, They Happened, And If He Falls They Didn't Happen.

If Both The Past And The External World Exist Only In The Mind, And If The Mind Itself Is Controllable - What Then?

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

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.

Good Novels Are Not Written By Orthodoxy-sniffers, Nor By People Who Are Conscience-stricken About Their Own Unorthodoxy. Good Novels Are Written By People Who Are Not Frightened.

The Secret Of A Successful Restaurant Is Sharp Knives.

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

Orthodoxy Is The Ability To Say Two And Two Make Five When Faith Requires It.

You're Only A Rebel From The Waist Downwards,' He Told Her.

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

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

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.

All Animals Are Equal, But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.

From Where Winston Stood It Was Just Possible To Read, Picked Out On Its White Face In Elegant Lettering, The Three Slogans Of The Party: War Is Peace Freedom Is Slavery Ignorance Is Strength.

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

[political] Prose Consists Less And Less Of Words Chosen For The Sake Of Their Meaning, And More And More Of Phrases Tacked Together Like The Sections Of A Prefabricated Hen-house.

Political Language

All Men Are Enemies. All Animals Are Comrades

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

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.

By Revolution We Become More Ourselves, Not Less.

I Had Been In London Innumerable Times, And Yet Till That Day I Had Never Noticed One Of The Worst Things About London-the Fact That It Costs Money Even To Sit Down.

To An Ordinary Human Being, Love Means Nothing If It Does Not Mean Loving Some People More Than Others.

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!

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.

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.

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

To Die Hating Them, That Was Freedom.

Perhaps A Lunatic Was Simply A Minority Of One. At One Time It Had Been A Sign Of Madness To Believe That The Earth Goes Round The Sun; Today, To Believe The Past Is Inalterable. He Might Be Alone In Holding That Belief, And If Alone, Then A Lunatic. But The Thought Of Being A Lunatic Did Not Greatly Trouble Him; The Horror Was That He Might Also Be Wrong.

The One Certain Thing Was That Death Never Came At An Expected Moment.

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.

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

What Is Not Hereditary Cannot Be Permanent.

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

Literature Is Doomed If Liberty Of Thought Perishes.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The Fight Against Bad English Is Not Frivolous.

It Was Almost Normal For People Over Thirty To Be Frightened Of Their Own Children

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.

Do You Know Why You’re Here? Shall I Tell You Why We Brought You Here? To Cure You.to Make You Sane.

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.

Is The English Press Honest Or Dishonest? At Normal Times It Is Deeply Dishonest. All The Papers That Matter Live Off Their Advertisements, And The Advertisers Exercise An Indirect Censorship Over News. Yet I Do Not Suppose There Is One Paper In England That Can Be Straightforwardly Bribed With Hard Cash. In The France Of The Third Republic All But A Very Few Of The Newspapers Could Notoriously Be Bought Over The Counter Like So Many Pounds Of Cheese.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Power Is Not A Means; It Is An End.

Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad.

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

The Paris Slums Are A Gathering-place For Eccentric People - People Who Have Fallen Into Solitary, Half-mad Grooves Of Life And Given Up Trying To Be Normal Or Decent. Poverty Frees Them From Ordinary Standards Of Behavior, Just As Money Frees People From Work.

The Intellectual Is Different From The Ordinary Man, But Only In Certain Sections Of His Personality, And Even Then Not All The Time.

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

The Organizing Principal For Any Culture Is War.

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

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

I'd Like To Start A Religion. That's Where The Money Is.

In Some Ways She Was Far More Acute Than Winston, And Far Less Susceptible To Party Propaganda. Once When He Happened In Some Connection To Mention The War Against Eurasia, She Startled Him By Saying Casually That In Her Opinion The War Was Not Happening. The Rocket Bombs Which Fell Daily On London Were Probably Fired By The Government Of Oceania Itself, "just To Keep The People Frightened."

Perhaps It Is Only When People Are Somewhere Near The Starvation Level That They Have Anything To Sing About.

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

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. It Might Be A Thousand Years. At Present Nothing Is Possible Except To Extend The Area Of Sanity Little By Little. We Cannot Act Collectively. We Can Only Spread Our Knowledge Outwards From Individual To Individual, Generation After Generation. In The Face Of The Thought Police There Is No Other Way.

At Any Given Moment There Is An Orthodoxy, A Body Of Ideas Of Which It Is Assumed That All Right-thinking People Will Accept Without Question. It Is Not Exactly Forbidden To Say This, That Or The Other, But It Is 'not Done' To Say It... Anyone Who Challenges The Prevailing Orthodoxy Finds Himself Silenced With Surprising Effectiveness. A Genuinely Unfashionable Opinion Is Almost Never Given A Fair Hearing, Either In The Popular Press Or In The High-brow Periodicals.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Choice For Mankind Lies Between Freedom And Happiness And For The Great Bulk Of Mankind, Happiness Is Better.

Freedom And Happiness

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.

The Mutability Of The Past Is The Central Tenet Of Ingsoc. Past Events, It Is Argued, Have No Objective Existance, But Survive Only In Written Records And In Human Memories. The Past Is Whatever The Records And The Memories Agree Upon. And Since The Party Is In Full Control Of All Records, And In Equally Full Control Of The Minds Of Its Members, It Follows That The Past Is Whatever The Party Chooses To Make It.

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

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.

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 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 Man May Take To Drink Because He Feels Himself To Be A Failure, But Then Fail All The More Completely Because He Drinks.

Actions Are Held To Be Good Or Bad, Not On Their Own Merits, But According To Who Does Them. There Is Almost No Kind Of Outrage-torture, Imprisonment Without Trial, Assassination, The Bombing Of Civilians-which Does Not Change Its Moral Color When It Is Committed By 'our' Side. The Nationalist Not Only Does Not Disapprove Of Atrocities Committed By His Own Side, He Has A Remarkable Capacity For Not Even Hearing About Them.

Atrocities Committed

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.

When I See An Actual Flesh-and-blood Worker In Conflict With His Natural Enemy, The Policeman, I Do Not Have To Ask Myself Which Side I Am On.

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

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.

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

An Earthquake Is Such Fun When It Is Over.

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

The Whole Question Of Evolution Seems Less Momentous Than It Did, Because, Unlike The Victorians, We Do Not Feel That To Be Descended From Animals Is Degrading To Human Dignity.

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

Nearly All Creators Of Utopia Have Resembled The Man Who Has Toothache, And Therefore Thinks Happiness Consists In Not Having Toothache... Whoever Tries To Imagine Perfection Simply Reveals His Own Emptiness.

I Know It Is The Fashion To Say That Most Of Recorded History Is Lies Anyway. I Am Willing To Believe That History Is For The Most Part Inaccurate And Biased, But What Is Peculiar To Our Own Age Is The Abandonment Of The Idea That History Could Be Truthfully Written.

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.

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

Keeping Secrets

Society Has Always Seemed To Demand A Little More From Human Beings Than It Will Get In Practice.

The Idea Really Came To Me The Day I Got My New False Teeth.

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

All Tyrannies Rule Through Fraud And Force, But Once The Fraud Is Exposed They Must Rely Exclusively On Force.

The Object Of Powder Is Powder.

[t]he More One Is Conscious Of One's Political Bias, The More Chance One Has Of Acting Politically Without Sacrificing One's Aesthetic And Intellectual Integrity.

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

I Have The Most Evil Memories Of Spain, But I Have Very Few Bad Memories Of Spaniards.

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

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.

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.

It [england] Is A Family In Which The Young Are Generally Thwarted And Most Of The Power Is In The Hands Of Irresponsible Uncles And Bedridden Aunts.

The Mass Of The Rich And The Poor Are Differentiated By Their Incomes And Nothing Else,and The Average Millionaire Is Only The Average Dishwasher Dressed In A New Suit.

But The Proles, If Only They Could Somehow Become Conscious Of Their Own Strength, Would Have No Need To Conspire. They Needed Only To Rise Up And Shake Themselves Like A Horse Shaking Off Flies. If They Chose They Could Blow The Party To Pieces Tomorrow Morning. Surely Sooner Or Later It Must Occur To Them To Do It? And Yet --!

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.

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.

Money Has Become The Grand Test Of Virtue. By This Test Beggars Fail, And For This They Are Despised. If One Could Earn Even Ten Pounds A Week At Begging, It Would Become A Respectable Profession Immediately. A Beggar, Looked At Realistically, Is Simply A Businessman, Getting His Living, Like Other Businessmen, In The Way That Comes To Hand. He Has Not, More Than Most Modem People, Sold His Honour; He Has Merely Made The Mistake Of Choosing A Trade At Which It Is Impossible To Grow Rich.

I Believe That The Bbc, In Spite Of The Stupidity Of Its Foreign Propaganda And The Unbearable Voices Of Its Announcers, Is Very Truthful. It Is Generally Regarded Here As More Reliable Than The Press.

All Human Relationships Must Be Purchased With Money.

Human Relations

Human Relationships

He Was A Lonely Ghost Uttering A Truth That Nobody Would Ever Hear. But So Long As He Uttered It, In Some Obscure Way The Continuity Was Not Broken. It Was Not By Making Yourself Heard But By Staying Sane That You Carried On The Human Heritage.

The Mute Protest In Your Own Bones

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.

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

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.

Gordon Eyed Them With Inert Hatred. At This Moment He Hated All Books, And Novels Most Of All. Horrible To Think Of All That Soggy, Half-baked Trash Massed Together In One Place.

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

Totalitarianism, However, Does Not So Much Promise An Age Of Faith As An Age Of Schizophrenia. 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. Such A Society, No Matter How Long It Persists, Can Never Afford To Become Either Tolerant Or Intellectually Stable.

All Rulers In All Ages Have Tried To Impose A False View Of The World Upon Their Followers.

The Real Division Is Not Between Conservatives And Revolutionaries But Between Authoritarians And Libertarians.

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

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

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.

In The Past The Need For A Hierarchal Form Of Society Has Been The Doctrine Specifically Of The High. It Had Been Preached By Kings And Aristocrats And The Priests, Lawyers And The Like Who Were Parasitical Upon Them, And It Had Generally Been Softened By Promises Of An Imaginary World Beyond The Grave.

It Was Only A Hopeless Fantasy, It Passed Like An April Day, But A Look And A Word And The Dreams They Stirred They Have Stolen My Heart Away.

Tragedy, He Precieved, Belonged To The Ancient Time, To A Time When There Were Still Privacy, Love, And Friendship, And When The Members Of A Family Stood By One Another Without Needing To Know The Reason.

Love And Friendship

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.

Men Are Only As Good As Their Technical Development Allows Them To Be.

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

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.

There Is A Geographical Element In All Belief-saying What Seem Profound Truths In India Have A Way Of Seeming Enormous Platitudes In England, And Vice Versa . Perhaps The Fundamental Difference Is That Beneath A Tropical Sun Individuality Seems Less Distinct And The Loss Of It Less Important.

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

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.

Saints Should Always Be Judged Guilty Until They Are Proved Innocent, But The Tests That Have To Be Applied To Them Are Not, Of Course, The Same In All Cases.

I Am Afraid Of Death. You Are Young, So Presumably You're More Afraid Of It Than I Am. Obviously We Shall Put If Off As Long As We Can. But It Makes Very Little Difference. So Long As Human Beings Stay Human, Death And Life Are The Same Thing.

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