As I Please Quotes

“* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945

“The thing that strikes me more and more, is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945

“A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer?" You know the answer, of course.”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945

“The 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, As I Please: 1943-1945

“I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters so long as you can score a neat debating point.”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945

“As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945

“... here I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit—disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is “objectively.” We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus, pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis: and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945

“Ante todo, un aviso a los periodistas ingleses de izquierda y a los intelectuales en general: recuerden que la deshonestidad y la cobardía siempre se pagan. No vayan a creerse que por años y años pueden estar haciendo de serviles propagandistas del régimen soviético o de otro cualquiera y después pueden volver repentinamente a la honestidad intelectual. Eso es prostitución y nada más que prostitución.”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945