When these images clash – as in The Fascist octupus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.
Every man has the face he deserves at fifty.
People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.
Few people have the guts to say outright that art and propaganda are the same thing.
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.
It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.
The following are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought: Obsession. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit.
Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.
The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban... 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 highbrow periodicals.
I have managed to make the Capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against Capitalism.
The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.
To be marching up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating slogans, and then to be bumped off from an upper window by some total stranger with a sub-machine-gun – that is not my idea of a useful way to die.
They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.
When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...
Quite apart from anything else, the rule of money sees to it that we shall be governed largely by the old – that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age they are living in or what enemy they are fighting.
He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one... He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, a lunatic. But the though of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
Society was ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory business men, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side; there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view.