xy
@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.”
George Orwell book 1984
Variant: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
Source: 1984
George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia
Source: Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Context: I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
"The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941)
Source: Why I Write
Context: Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.
“Freedom of the Press,
if it means anything at all,
means the freedom
to criticize and oppose”
George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist
“A lunatic is just a minority of one.”
George Orwell book 1984
Variant: Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
Source: 1984
George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 30
Source: Down and Out in Paris and London
Context: He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.
“Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”
George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 4
Source: Down and Out in Paris and London
Context: For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.