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| George Orwell
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite. A liberal is a power worshipper without the power. 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. Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. {from 'Animal Farm'} 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. An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. 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. And I believe that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph again. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents. At fifty everyone has the face he deserves. Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. 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. Big Brother is watching you. (from the novel, '1984') But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit. Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no whip. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility. 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. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism. For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity. Four legs good, two legs bad. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. Happiness can exist only in acceptance. He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him. History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics. I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. [
] One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane. I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt. I'm fat, but I'm thin inside ... there's a thin man inside every fat man. If a man meets with injustice, it is not required that he shall not be roused to meet it; but if he is angry after he has had time to think upon it, that is sinful. The flame is not wring, but the coals are. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. 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? If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him. 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. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen. Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. Liberal: a power worshipper without power. 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. Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. Men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed 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. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Myths which are believed in tend to become true. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappyNot to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. 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. One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up. One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using ones intelligence. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. 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. One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude. 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. People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. Political chaos is connected with the decay of language ... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. Political language and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to anarchists is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind. Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. 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. 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. Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever. Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. 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. Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. The ''Communism'' of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated. 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 best books... are those that tell you what you know already. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild, knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes. 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. The great weapon of power, exploitation, manipulation, and oppression is language. The 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. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. The main motive for "nonattachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. The patriotism of the middle class is a thing to be made use of. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose itThe very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. The weakness of all left-wing parties is their inability to tell the truth about the immediate future. There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them. There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you. To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle. To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself. To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. War is war. The only good human being is a dead one. We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun. 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. We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. 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? Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war. Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war. |
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