But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed.
Our civilisation is haunted by the notion that the quickest way of doing anything is invariably the best.
Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On.
No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He.
It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday.
He accepted everything. The past was alterable.
Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal.
Georges Kopp, on his periodical tours of inspection, was quite frank with us. ‘This is not a war,’ he used to say, ’it is a comic opera with an occasional death.
He would read King Lear and forget this filthy century.
The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a ‘real’ world where ‘real’ things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save though out own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.
All people who work with their hands are party invisible, and the more important the work they do, the more invisible they are.
From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
If he were allowed to 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.
Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody.
I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate parties.
Orang mengorbankan diri mereka demi komunitas fragmentaris – bangsa, ras, keyakinan, kelas – dan baru menyadari bahwa mereka bukan individu ketika mereka disongsong peluru.
You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.
The other farmers sympathised in principle, but they did not at first give him much help. At heart, each of them was secretly wondering whether he could not somehow turn Jones’s misfortune to his own advantage.
What writers, artists, scientists and philosophers say today is indicative of future rather than current developments.