iosephvs bibliothecarivs > Recent Status Updates

"Part of our minds - in any normal person it is the dominant part - believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence."

"It might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an anti-social act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground."

"The atom bombs are piling up on the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming through the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it."

"Is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? Many people think so."

"The price of virtuosity is abject slavery to a complaisant tool, that of creative artistry is willful dominance over a recalcitrant tool."

2/2 "There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost in terms of money, may be the same in each case."

1/2 "It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years...."

"Any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought."

"To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox."

3/3 "This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."

2/3 "...or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change in doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures."

1/3 "From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to bethought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made..."

"Freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticise and oppose."

"Some... seemingly frivolous rhymes actually express a deeply pessimistic view of life, the churchyard wisdom of the peasant. For instance:

Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

which is a gloomy story, but remarkably similar to yours or mine."

"That antisemitism will be definitively cured, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe."

"[Anti-Semitism] is at bottom quite irrational and will not yield to argument."

"Perhaps... whether desirable or not, [an Earthly Paradise] isn't possible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure."

2/2 "Fascism is often loosely equated with sadism, but nearly always by people who see nothing wrong in the most slavish worship of Stalin. The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini.... All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty."

1/2 "The growth of 'realism' (meaning the doctrine that might is right) has been the great feature of the intellectual history of or own age. Why this should be so is a complicated question. The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched...."

"The British public tolerates a harsh criminal law and gets a kick out of monstrously unfair murder trials."

"Cricket is not in reality a very popular game in England - it is nowhere near so popular as football, for instance - but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value 'form' or 'style' more highly than success."

"Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals."

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful."

"If there is anything quite as good as the soft part of the crust from an English cottage loaf... I do not know of it."

"The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his 'materialism'! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all."

2/2 "Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about 'godless' Russia and the 'materialism' of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them."

1/2 "When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew!.... They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings."