It was curious how that beetlelike type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.
The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences.
It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice.
But of course we must never forget, Mrs. Pither, that there’s a better world coming. This life is only a time of trial – just to strengthen us and teach us to be patient, so that we’ll be ready for Heaven when the time comes.
Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern in everyone else but never in ourselves.
People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.
Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.
Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A.
The Americans always go one better on any kind of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering or theosophy.
At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone.
Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor.
It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
El ataque directo y consciente contra la honradez intelectual procede de los propios intelectuales.
Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at.
And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.
To prevent us from shooting each other in the darkness white armlets would be worn. At this moment a messenger arrived to say that there were no white armlets.
Modern man is rather like a bisected wasp which goes on sucking jam and pretends that the loss of its abdomen does not matter.
A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors.
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.
Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.