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The Capitalists Owned Everything In The World, And Everyone Else Was Their Slave. They Owned All The Land, All The Houses, All The Factories, And All The Money. If Anyone Disobeyed Them They Could Throw Him Into Prison, Or They Could Take His Job Away And Starve Him To Death. When Any Ordinary Person Spoke To A Capitalist He Had To Cringe And Bow To Him, And Take Off His Cap And Address Him As 'sir'

-George Orwell

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The Capitalists Owned Everything

George Orwell

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The Capitalists Owned Everything In The World, And Everyone Else Was Their Slave. They Owned All The Land, All The Houses, All The Factories, And All The Money. If Anyone Disobeyed Them They Could Throw Him Into Prison, Or They Could Take His Job Away And Starve Him To Death. When Any Ordinary Person Spoke To A Capitalist He Had To Cringe And Bow To Him, And Take Off His Cap And Address Him As 'sir'

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

In A Town Like London There Are Always Plenty Of Not Quite Certifiable Lunatics Walking The Streets, And They Tend To Gravitate Towards Bookshops, Because A Bookshop Is One Of The Few Places Where You Can Hang About For A Long Time Without Spending Any Money.

The Machine Has Got To Be Accepted, But It Is Probably Better To Accept It Rather As One Accepts A Drug - That Is, Grudgingly And Suspiciously. Like A Drug, The Machine Is Useful, Dangerous, And Habit-forming. The Oftener One Surrenders To It The Tighter Its Grip Becomes.

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.

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

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

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.

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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.

"a Minority Of One"... The Definition Of Insanity.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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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.

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

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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 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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It Is A Mysterious Thing, The Loss Of Faith—as Mysterious As Faith Itself.

Mysterious Things

Poverty Is Spiritual Halitosis.

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

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

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.

She Had Had Her Momentary Flowering, A Year, Perhaps, Of Wildrose Beauty, And Then She Had Suddenly Swollen Like A Fertilized Fruit And Grown Hard And Red And Coarse, And Then Her Life Had Been Laundering, Scrubbing, Laundering, First For Children, Then For Grandchildren, Over Thirty Years. At The End Of It She Was Still Singing.

What Is Not Hereditary Cannot Be Permanent.

No One Can Look Back On His Schooldays And Say With Truth That They Were Altogether Unhappy.

For A Second, Two Seconds, They Had Exchanged An Equivocal Glance, And That Was The End Of The Story. But Even That Was A Memorable Event, In The Locked Loneliness In Which One Had To Live.

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.

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.

The Pleasures Of Spring Are Available To Everybody And Cost Nothing.

It's Frightful That People Who Are So Ignorant Should Have So Much Influence.

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.

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

If You Kept The Small Rules, You Could Break The Big Ones.

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

A Hideous Ecstasy Of Fear And Vindictiveness, A Desire To Kill, To Torture, To Smash Faces In With A Sledge Hammer, Seemed To Flow Through The Whole Group Of People Like An Electric Current, Turning One Even Against One's Will Into A Grimacing, Screaming Lunatic. And Yet The Rage That One Felt Was An Abstract, Undirected Emotion Which Could Be Switched From One Object To Another Like The Flame Of A Blowlamp.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Oceania Was At War With Eurasia; Therefore Oceania Had Always Been At War With Eurasia.

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

I Doubt Whether Classical Education Ever Has Been Or Can Be Successfully Carried Out Without Corporal Punishment.

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

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.

The Inflated Style Is Itself A Kind Of Euphemism. A Mass Of Latin Words Falls Upon The Facts Like Soft Snow, Blurring The Outlines And Covering Up All The Details. The Great Enemy Of Clear Language Is Insincerity.

Political Language

Think Of Something You Really Care About. Then Add Hour To Hour And Calculate The Fraction Of Your Life That You've Actually Spent In Doing It. And Then Calculate The Time You've Spent On Things Like Shaving, Riding To And Fro On Buses, Waiting In Railway Junctions, Swapping Dirty Stories, And Reading The Newspapers.

To Accept An Unorthodoxy Is Always To Inherit Unresolved Contradictions

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

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

Truth Becomes Untruth If Uttered By Your Enemy

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?

[t]he Outcry Against Killing Women, If You Accept Killing At All, Is Sheer Sentimentality.:; Why Is It Worse To Kill A Woman Than A Man?

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.

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

Sheer Egoism... Writers Share This Characteristic With Scientists, Artists, Politicians, Lawyers, Soldiers, Successful Businessmen - In Short, With The Whole Top Crust Of Humanity.

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

For The Ordinary Man Is Passive. Within A Narrow Circle (home Life, And Perhaps The Trade Unions Or Local Politics) He Feels Himself Master Of His Fate, But Against Major Events He Is As Helpless As Against The Elements. So Far From Endeavoring To Influence The Future, He Simply Lies Down And Lets Things Happen To Him.

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

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

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

The Further A Society Drifts From Truth The More It Will Hate Those Who Speak It.

All Art Is Propaganda.

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.

Political Language

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

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.

If You Want To Keep A Secret, You Must Also Hide It From Yourself. You Must Know All The While That It Is There, But Until It Is Needed You Must Never Let It Emerge Into Your Consciousness In Any Shape That Can Be Given A Name.

Only Old Benjamin Professed To Remember Every Detail Of His Long Life And To Know That Things Never Had Been, Nor Ever Could Be Much Better Or Much Worse--hunger, Hardship, And Disappointment Being, So He Said, The Unalterable Law Of Life.

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

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.

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

International Football Is The Continuation Of War By Other Means.

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.

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

How Could You Communicate With The Future? It Was Impossible. Either The Future Would Resemble The Present In Which Case It Would Not Listen To Him, Or It Would Be Different From It, And His Predicament Would Be Meaningless.

Where This Age Differs From Those Immediately Preceding It Is That A Liberal Intelligentsia Is Lacking. Bully-worship, Under Various Disguises, Has Become A Universal Religion, And Such Truisms As That A Machine-gun Is Still A Machine-gun Even When A "good" Man Is Squeezing The Trigger Have Turned Into Heresies Which It Is Actually Becoming Dangerous To Utter.

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.

No Animal Shall Kill Any Other Animal Without Cause.

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.

Sanity Is Not Statistical.

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.

Thoughtcrime Does Not Entail Death: Thoughtcrime Is Death.

There Are Books That One Reads Over And Over Again, Books That Become Part Of The Furniture Of One's Mind And Alter One's Whole Attitude To Life, Books That One Dips Into But Never Reads Through, Books That One Reads At A Single Sitting And Forgets A Week Later.

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!

[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.

The Mistake You Make, Don't You See,is In Thinking One Can Live In A Corrupt Society Without Being Corrupt Oneself. After All, What Do You Achieve By Refusing To Make Money? You're Trying To Behave As Though One Could Stand Right Outside Our Economic System. But One Can't. One's Got To Change The System, Or One Changes Nothing. One Can't Put Things Right In A Hole-and-corner Way, If You Take My Meaning.

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

The Secret Of A Successful Restaurant Is Sharp Knives.

You Are A Slow Learner, Winston." "how Can I Help It? How Can I Help But See What Is In Front Of My Eyes? Two And Two Are Four." "sometimes, Winston. Sometimes They Are Five. Sometimes They Are Three. Sometimes They Are All Of Them At Once. You Must Try Harder. It Is Not Easy To Become Sane.

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

It Was Curious To Think That The Sky Was The Same For Everybody, In Eurasia Or Eastasia As Well As Here. And The People Under The Sky Were Also Very Much The Same--everywhere, All Over The World, Hundreds Or Thousands Of Millions Of People Just Like This, People Ignorant Of One Another's Existence, Held Apart By Walls Of Hatred And Lies, And Yet Almost Exactly The Same--people Who Had Never Learned To Think But Were Storing Up In Their Hearts And Bellies And Muscles The Power That Would One Day Overturn The World.

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

Telling The Truth

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The Mute Protest In Your Own Bones

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.

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

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.

Perhaps A Lunatic Was Simply A Minority Of One.

In The Nineteenth Century Some Parts Of The World Were Unexplored, But There Was Almost No Restriction On Travel.:; Up To 1914 You Did Not Need A Passport For Any Country Except Russia.:; The European Emigrant, If He Could Scrape Together A Few Pounds For The Passage, Simply Set Sail For America Or Australia, And When He Got There No Questions Were Asked.:; In The Eighteenth Century It Had Been Quite Normal And Safe To Travel In A Country With Which Your Own Country Was At War.

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

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

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

The Modern Writer Who Has Influenced Me Most Is W. Somerset Maugham .

As A Rule They Will Refuse Even To Sample A Foreign Dish, They Regard Such Things As Garlic And Olive Oil With Disgust, Life Is Unliveable To Them Unless They Have Tea And Puddings.

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

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?

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.

The Party Is Not Interested In The Overt Act. The Thought Is All We Care About.

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

Four Legs Gooood, Two Legs Baaad!

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.

The Hospital Is The Antechamber To The Tomb

Politics Is The Choice Between The Lesser Of Two Evils.

News Is Something Somebody Doesn't Want Printed; All Else Is Advertising.

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.

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.

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.

Joyce Is A Poet And Also An Elephantine Pedant.

The Slovenliness Of Our Language Makes It Easier For Us To Have Foolish Thoughts.

Good Prose Should Be Transparent, Like A Window Pane.

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

In The Face Of Pain There Are No Heroes.

If There Is Hope, It Lies In The Proles.

Winston Could Not Definitely Remember A Time When His Country Had Not Been At War...war Had Literally Been Continuous, Though Strictly Speaking It Had Not Always Been The Same War. The Enemy Of The Moment Always Represented Absolute Evil.

The End Was Contained In The Beginning.

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

War Is War. The Only Good Human Being Is A Dead One.

The Past Was Erased, The Erasure Was Forgotten, The Lie Became The Truth.

A Man Who Gives A Good Account Of Himself Is Probably Lying, Since Any Life When Viewed From The Inside Is Simply A Series Of Defeats.

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

Since Pacifists Have More Freedom Of Action In Countries Where Traces Of Democracy Survive, Pacifism Can Act More Effectively Against Democracy Than For It. Objectively The Pacifist Is Pro-nazi.

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.

The Clock Struck Half Past Two. In The Little Office At The Back Of Mr. Mckechnie's Bookshop, Gordon--gordon Comstock, Last Member Of The Comstock Family, Aged Twenty-nine And Rather Moth-eaten Already--lounged Across The Table, Pushing A Fourpenny Packet Of Player's Weights Open And Shut With His Thumb.

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

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

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.

The Energy That Actually Shapes The World Springs From Emotions - Racial Pride, Leader-worship, Religious Belief, Love Of War - Which Liberal Intellectuals Mechanically Write Off As Anachronisms, And Which They Have Usually Destroyed So Completely In Themselves As To Have Lost All Power Of Action.

The Upper Class Desire To Remain So, The Middle Class Wish To Overthrow The Upper Class, And The Lower Class Want A Classless System.

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.

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.

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

The High-water Mark, So To Speak, Of Socialist Literature Is W.h. Auden, A Sort Of Gutless Kipling.

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.

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

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

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

Million Dollars

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.

Power Is Not A Means; It Is An End.

To Walk Through The Ruined Cities Of Germany Is To Feel An Actual Doubt About The Continuity Of Civilization.

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

You Must Try Harder. It Is Not Easy To Become Sane.

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

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

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 --!

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