- Attlee [1] reminds me of nothing so much as
a recently dead fish, before it has time to stiffen. [diary,
19 May 1942]
- All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
[Animal
Farm, 1945]
- The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent
cannot be both honest and intelligent.
[In Polemic January 1946, ‘The
prevention of Literature’]
- Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer
all the year round.
[Coming up for Air, 1939]
- Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense.
If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out
that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such
a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me
is against me’.
[In Tribune October 1945, ‘War
& Peace’]
- War Is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
[Nineteen Eighty-Four,
1949]
- Who controls the past controls the future: who controls tbe present
controls the past.
[Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949]
- Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is narrow the range
of thought? In the end we shaIl make thoughtcrime literaIly impossible,
because there will be no words in which to express it.
[Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949]
- Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in
one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
[Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949]
- The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onward is that they have
wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.
[Arthur Koestler, Critical
Essays, 1946 ]
- Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one
that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Commentary on George
Orwell and the Spanish civil war.
Animal Farm by George Orwell (1946)
hbk: 1993, Knopf, (Everyman's Library Series), 0679420398, $12.00
[amazon.com]
2000, Longman, 0582434475, [amazon.co.uk]
pbk: 1996, Prentice Hall, 0451526341, $6.95
[amazon.com]
2000, Penguin Books, 0141182709,
£4.79
[amazon.co.uk
Nineteen eighty-four, written in 1949,
1990, Turtleback, 0606001999, £7.40
Critical Essays,
written in 1944, first published 1946.
hbk, Secker Warburg,
1946: amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
end notes
- Immediately post-WW2 UK prime minister, responsible
for a huge extension of State power, eventually leading to the collapse
of much British industry. On Attlee, Winston Churchill said, “A
modest man who has much to be modest about.”[1954]
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