Snippitts of Illusions

George

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Big Brother is watching you.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

-all quotes George Orwell.

posted by F.G. Shaw @ 1:46 PM