Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

“Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.”

“These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won't stop at Fascists.”

+ “And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who objectively endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.”

“(…) an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. +

“The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire:I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it”. (…) means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.”

“Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organized societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is "freedom for the other fellow”.

“Is every opinion, however unpopular - however foolish, even - entitled to a hearing?
Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say 'Yes. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, 'How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?', and the answer more often than not will be 'No'.”

+ This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story. One does not say that a book ought not to have been published' merely because it is a bad book. After all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers.”

“Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book and a disgraceful waste of paper. +

“This attitude was usually defended on the ground that the international situation, and the urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it; but it was clear that this was a rationalization.”

“You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press.”

“It is important to distinguish between the kind of censorship that the English literary intelligentsia voluntarily impose upon themselves, and the censorship that can sometimes be enforced by pressure groups. Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of vested interests.”

“For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals.”

“The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio.”

“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”

“No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

“(…) congratulated the pigs on the low rations, the long working-hours and the general absence of pampering which he had observed on Animal Farm.”

“…the lower animals on Animal Farm did more work and received less food than any animals in the county. (…) Their struggles and their difficulties were one. Was not the labour problem the same everywhere? 'If you have your lower animals to contend with, he said,
'we have our lower classes!' “

“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME
ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

“but they were conscious that they were not as other animals. If they went hungry, it was not from feeding tyrannical human beings; if they worked hard, at least they worked for themselves. No creature among them went upon two legs. No creature called any other creature 'Master'. All animals were equal.”

“Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, (…), things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember.
There was nothing with which they could compare their present lives: they had nothing to go upon except Squealer's lists of figures, (…) everything was getting better and better.”

“Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer - except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.”

“Many of the animals believed him. Their lives now, they reasoned, were hungry and laborious; was it not right and just that a better world should exist somewhere else?”

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

“'War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.”

O QUE É QUE FIZERAM AO LEITE?!