Quote collection
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"Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted."
"Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever."
"What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?"
"No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer."
"It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life."
"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the robbery shall continue."
"You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that."
"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."
"Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers."
"The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency."
"The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men"
"The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity."
"In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone."
"It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide."
"A humanitarian is always a hypocrite."
"This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half."
"A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today"
"The English are probably more capable than most peoples of making revolutionary change without bloodshed. In England, if anywhere,it would be possible to abolish poverty without destroying liberty."
"The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do."
"He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written."