George Orwell |
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"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent ..."
- George Orwell (Reflections On Gandhi)
"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 or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’(1). But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism." - George Orwell (Notes on Nationalism, 1945)
"He may be a positive or a negative nationalist -- that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating -- but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.
He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade.
But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success.
The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him.
Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also -- since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself -- unshakeably certain of being in the right."
- George Orwell (Notes on Nationalism, 1945)
"And if we did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we saw him, so choked as we are with trash?" - George Orwell (Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
"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". -- George Orwell (Animal Farm - 1945 Introduction)
"If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only remedy remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human being, if you can catch him young enough." - George Orwell (Charles Dickens, 1940)
“The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power.
There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances.
They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars.
Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind.
For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right?
And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.” - George Orwell / Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
"Gandhi's attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. 'Sayagraha,' first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred**
... Gandhi objected to 'passive resistance' as a translation of 'Sayagraha:' in Gujariti, it seems, the word means 'firmness in the truth.'" George Orwell, (Reflections on Gandhi)
"Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality." - George Orwell (Notes on Nationalism, 1945)
“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks that 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 wiser 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.”
― George Orwell, Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun, (1943)
"Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: 'What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?' I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions ..." - Reflections on Gandhi, (1949)
“But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most … the direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.” - George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
“As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias … you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.” - George Orwell, Notes On Nationalism
“For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity.” - George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
“What is really at the issue is the right to report contemporary issues truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias, and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.”
- George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
“Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report was one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.” - George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
“Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale (1940)
"Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old–generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. 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 yet foresee. The central problem–how to prevent power from being abused–remains unsolved."
- George Orwell, Charles Dickens (1940)
"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy." - George Orwell (Rudyard Kipling, 1942)
"As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognise that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.” - Notes on Nationalism (1945)
"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."
― George Orwell
"The masses, it seems, have vague aspirations towards liberty and human brotherhood, which are easily played upon by power-hungry individuals or minorities. So that history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters." ― George Orwell, James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946)
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
― George Orwell
'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." - George Orwell (Notes on Nationalism, 1945)
Every intelligent boy by the age of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait."
― George Orwell
“Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”
― George Orwell
"I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them."
–George Orwell, London Letter in: Partisan Review (Winter, 1945)
The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified.
– George Orwell, London Letter in: Partisan Review (Winter, 1945)
“That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”
― George Orwell
"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 ..."
― George Orwell, In Front Of Your Nose (1946
"The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history."
― George Orwell
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.
- 1984
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
~ George Orwell
“Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”
― George Orwell
- Even as it stands, the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. 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 LABOURER'S COTTAGE, IS THE SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY. IT IS OUR JOB TO SEE THAT IT STAYS THERE." ― George Orwell / "Don't Let Colonel Blimp Ruin the Home Guard" article for the Evening Standard, 8 January 1941
“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm
“The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”
― George Orwell
"So far as I can see, 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." – George Orwell, London Letter in: Partisan Review (Winter, 1945)
I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them. –George Orwell, London Letter in: Partisan Review (Winter, 1945)
“Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.”
― George Orwell
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." ― George Orwell, 1984
“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.”
― George Orwell, 1984
If the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art.
― George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature
"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it." ― George Orwell, Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)
“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” ― George Orwell
― George Orwell
- The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.
- "No, Not One," Adelphi (October 1941)
If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing... The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. ― George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune (8 December 1944)
- "As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents."
―George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier
"In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." ―George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier
“Part IV of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS is a picture of an anarchistic Society, not governed by law in the ordinary sense, but by the dictates of ‘Reason’, which are voluntarily accepted by everyone. This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is explicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of Society.
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.
There was no room for disagreement among them, because the truth is always either self-evident, or else it is undis-coverable and unimportant. They had apparently no word for ‘opinion’ in their language, and in their conversations there was no ‘difference of sentiments’.
They had reached, in fact, the highest stage of totalitarian organization, the stage when conformity has become so general that there is no need for a police force.
‘Reason,’ among the Houyhnhnms, he says, is not a Point Problematical, as with us, where men can argue with Plausibility on both Sides of a Question; but strikes you with immediate Conviction; as it must needs do, where it is not mingled, obscured, or discoloured by Passion and Interest.’
In other words, we know everything already, so why should dissident opinions be tolerated?”
- George Orwell, Politics vs Literature
"The most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.'"
- ― George Orwell, As I Please (25 February 1944)
"Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is NOW a normal condition among adult human beings; but perhaps it COULD be made normal, and it is upon this question that all serious political controversy really turns."
― George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature — An examination of Gulliver's Travels
"Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters."
- ― George Orwell, "London Letter" in Partisan Review (Winter 1944)
"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."
― George Orwell
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
― George Orwell
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.”
― George Orwell
"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.”
― George Orwell
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
― George Orwell
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
― George Orwell
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
― George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: