xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023
George Orwell photo

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Source: All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays

George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

George Orwell book 1984

"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: 1984
Context: But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Context: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

George Orwell photo

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

George Orwell book 1984

Variant: For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.
Source: 1984

George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)
Context: Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.

George Orwell photo

“But it takes a war to make map-reading popular.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Source: "As I Please," Tribune (11 February 1944)

George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo