Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course – but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.
Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English had got into the habit of saying that this wasn’t a war, it was a bloody pantomime. We were hardly under direct fire from the Fascists. The only danger was from stray bullets, which, as the lines curved forward on either side, came from several directions. All the casualties at this time were from strays. Arthur Clinton got a mysterious bullet that smashed his left shoulder and disabled his arm, permanently, I am afraid.
What we call democracy in a capitalist country only remains in being while things are going well; in time of difficulty it turns immediately into Fascism.
They carried on a curious intermittent conversation which flicked on and off like the beams of a lighthouse suddenly nipped into silence by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen then taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence then abruptly cut short as they parted at the agreed spot then continued almost without introduction on the following day.
It had long been realised that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called ‘abolition of private property’ which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals.
Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.’ ‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals – mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.
When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasfemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.
By lack of understanding they remained sane.
There will be no art, no literature, no science.
But every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message,’ whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The.
No case is really answered until it has had a fair hearing.
All “favourable” Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness.
The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies – unless one counts journalists.
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain.
You can be rich or deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.