xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For 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? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)

“Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.”

George Orwell book Burmese Days

Source: Burmese Days (1934), Ch. XX

“[T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please," Tribune (14 July 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/ "As I Please" (1943–1947)

“Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have?”

George Orwell book Burmese Days

Ch XX
Burmese Days (1934)

“I note that once again there is serious talk of trying to attract tourists to this country after the war… [b]ut it is quite safe to prophesy that the attempt will be a failure. Apart from the many other difficulties, our licensing laws and the artificial price of drink are quite enough to keep foreigners away…. But even these prices are less dismaying to foreigners than the lunatic laws which permit you to buy a glass of beer at half past ten while forbidding you to buy it at twenty-ﬁve past, and which have done their best to turn the pubs into mere boozing shops by excluding children from them.
How downtrodden we are in comparison with most other peoples is shown by the fact that even people who are far from being ""temperance"" don't seriously imagine that our licensing laws could be altered. Whenever I suggest that pubs might be allowed to open in the afternoon, or to stay open till midnight, I always get the same answer: ""The ﬁrst people to object would be the publicans. They don't want to have to stay open twelve hours a day."" People assume, you see, that opening hours, whether long or short, must be regulated by the law, even for one-man businesses. In France, and in various other countries, a café proprietor opens or shuts just as it suits him. He can keep open the whole twenty-four hours if he wants to; and, on the other hand, if he feels like shutting his cafe and going away for a week, he can do that too. In England we have had no such liberty for about a hundred years, and people are hardly able to imagine it.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

As I Please column in The Tribune (18 August 1944), http://alexpeak.com/twr/dwall/ "As I Please" (1943–1947)

“The Daily Worker disapproves of dictatorship in Athens, the Catholic Herald disapproves of dictatorship in Belgrade. There is no one who is able to say—at least, no one who has the chance to say in a newspaper of big circulation—that this whole dirty game of spheres of inﬂuence, quislings, purges, deportation, one-party elections and hundred per cent plebiscites is morally the same whether it is done by ourselves, the Russians or the Nazis. Even in the case of such frank returns to barbarism as the use of hostages, disapproval is only felt when it happens to be the enemy and not ourselves who is doing it.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please," Tribune (26 January 1945) http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/ "As I Please" (1943–1947)

“Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country, and even less, I should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must have their "atrocities" from one source or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-down of war criminals and quislings.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Revenge is Sour", Tribune (9 November 1945)

“I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“From Carlyle onwards, but especially in the last generation, the British intelligentsia have tended to take their ideas from Europe and have been infected by habits of thought that derive ultimately from Machiavelli. All the cults that have been fashionable in the last dozen years, Communism, Fascism, and pacifism, are in the last analysis forms of power worship.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"The English People" (written Spring 1944, published 1947) http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please," Tribune (7 July 1944)
As I Please (1943–1947)

“The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. 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.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Revenge is Sour" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/revenge/english/e_revso, Tribune (9 November 1945)

“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

“We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Letter to The Tribune (20 December 1940), later published in A Patriot After All, 1940-1941 (1999)

“People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty to some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"How the Poor Die" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/Poor_Die/english/e_pdie, Now (November 1946)

“Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"London Letter" in Partisan Review (Winter 1945)

“How sweet the air does smell — even the air of a back-street in the suburbs — after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike!”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 27, on the morning after Orwell is let out of his first tramps' accommodation, or 'spike'.

“Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Notes on Nationalism (1945)

“It is not a good symptom that hanging should still be the accepted form of capital punishment in this country. Hanging is a barbarous, inefficient way of killing anybody, and at least one fact about it—quite widely known, I believe—is so obscene as to be almost unprintable.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please" column in The Tribune (15 November 1946) http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/ "As I Please" (1943–1947)

“One of the big failures in human history has been the agelong attempt to stop women painting their faces.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please," Tribune (28 April 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/ As I Please (1943–1947)

“It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Reflections on Gandhi (1949)