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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.

-George Orwell

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Lastly, Tea--unless One Is

George Orwell

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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.

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

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You Must Be An Intellectual. A Normal Person Would Never Believe A Thing Like That.

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Political Language

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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

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

War Is Evil, But It Is Often The Lesser Evil.

There, Comrades, Is The Answer To All Our Problems. It Is Summed Up In A Single Word-- Man

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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.

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So Much Of Left-wing Thought Is A Kind Of Playing With Fire By People Who Don't Even Know That Fire Is Hot.

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

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Political Language

Some Ideas Are So Stupid That Only Intellectuals Believe Them.

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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.

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

Political Language

He Would Say That God Had Given Him A Tail To Keep The Flies Off, But That He Would Sooner Have Had No Tail And No Flies.

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

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

At Any Given Moment There Is An Orthodoxy, A Body Of Ideas Which It Is Assumed That All Right-thinking People Will Accept Without Question.

It Is Fatal To Look Hungry. It Makes People Want To Kick You.

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

I Had The Lonely Child's Habit Of Making Up Stories And Holding Conversations With Imaginary Persons, And I Think From The Very Start My Literary Ambitions Were Mixed Up With The Feeling Of Being Isolated And Undervalued. I Knew That I Had A Facility With Words And A Power Of Facing Unpleasant Facts, And I Felt That This Created A Sort Of Private World In Which I Could Get My Own Back For My Failure In Everyday Life.

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.

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Patriotism Is Usually Stronger Than Class Hatred, And Always Stronger Than Internationalism.

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

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

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.

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

Don’t You See That The Whole Aim Of Newspeak Is To Narrow The Range Of Thought? In The End We Shall Make Thoughtcrime Literally Impossible, Because There Will Be No Words In Which To Express It.

The Secret Of A Successful Restaurant Is Sharp Knives.

In A Way, The World-view Of The Party Imposed Itself Most Successfully On People Incapable Of Understanding It. 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. By Lack Of Understanding They Remained Sane. They Simply Swallowed Everything, And What They Swallowed Did Them No Harm, Because It Left No Residue Behind, Just As A Grain Of Corn Will Pass Undigested Through The Body Of A Bird.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

We Are In A Strange Period Of History In Which A Revolutionary Has To Be A Patriot And A Patriot Has To Be A Revolutionary.

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Nationalism Is Power Hunger Tempered By Self-deception.

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

War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.

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.

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

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

History Has Stopped. Nothing Exists Except An Endless Present In Which The Party Is Always Right.

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

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.

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

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

The Organizing Principal For Any Culture Is War.

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.

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

The War Is Not Meant To Be Won, It Is Meant To Be Continuous.

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.

So Long As They (the Proles) Continued To Work And Breed, Their Other Activities Were Without Importance. Left To Themselves, Like Cattle Turned Loose Upon The Plains Of Argentina, They Had Reverted To A Style Of Life That Appeared To Be Natural To Them, A Sort Of Ancestral Pattern...heavy Physical Work, The Care Of Home And Children, Petty Quarrels With Neighbors, Films, Football, Beer And Above All, Gambling Filled Up The Horizon Of Their Minds. To Keep Them In Control Was Not Difficult.

[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.

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.

The Atmosphere Of Orthodoxy Is Always Damaging To Prose, And Above All It Is Completely Ruinous To The Novel, The Most Anarchical Of All Forms Of Literature.

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

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

Today There Were Fear, Hatred, And Pain, But No Dignity Of Emotion, No Deep Or Complex Sorrows.

There Is Only One Way To Make Money At Writing, And That Is To Marry A Publisher's Daughter.

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

Inanimate Objects

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.

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

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

From A Very Early Age, Perhaps The Age Of Five Or Six, I Knew That When I Grew Up I Should Be A Writer. Between The Ages Of About Seventeen And Twenty-four I Tried To Abandon This Idea, But I Did So With The Consciousness That I Was Outraging My True Nature And That Sooner Or Later I Should Have To Settle Down And Write Books.

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.

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

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

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

Man Serves The Interests Of No Creature Except Himself.

The Revolution Will Be Complete When The Language Is Perfect.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

In This Game That We're Playing, We Can't Win. Some Kinds Of Failure Are Better Than Other Kinds, That's All.

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Raymond E. Feist

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