It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
Who cares?′ she said impatiently, ’it’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.
Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.
It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.
But even that was a memorable event in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
Baju adalah sesuatu yang berkuasa. Dengan berpakaian gelandangan, sangat sulit, untuk tidak merasakan bahwa kamu sedang mengalami penurunan status.
Se le persone non sanno scrivere bene allora non sanno pensare bene e se non sanno pensare bene altri penseranno per loro.
Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else – that is, it concentrates on an author’s style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.
Invidia e un lucru oribil. Se deosebeste de toate celelalte suferinte pentru ca nu poate fi deghizata, nu poate fi inaltata pana la tragedie. E mai mult decat simpla durere, e dezgustatoare.
We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.
All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.
One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend – the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist.
Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.
These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.
And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.
It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.