Inside the Whale and Other Essays Quotes

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“But now and then there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old - generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“Vice is punished, but virtue is not rewarded”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face toward the flames.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“The worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have grown up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic régime is like. Nearly all the dominant writers of the thirties belonged to the soft-boiled emancipated middle class and were too young to have effective memories of The Great War. To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc. etc. are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays

“As pessoas de barriga vazia jamais perdem a esperança no universo, aliás nem sequer pensam no universo.”
― George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays