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George Orwell
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„How sweet the air does smell — even the air of a back-street in the suburbs — after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike!“
„One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.“
„Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it. … Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness… The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff’s.“
„Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.“
„She looked at him helplessly. After all, it was no use. There was this money-business standing in the way – these meaningless scruples which she had never understood but which she had accepted merely because they were his. She felt all the impotence, the resentment of a woman who sees an abstract idea triumphing over common sense.“
„He would only drift and sink, drift and sink, like the others of his family; but worse than them – down, down into some dreadful sub-world that as yet he could only dimly imagine. It was what he had chosen when he declared war on money. Serve the money-god or go under; there is no other rule.“
„The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.“
„Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.“
„I always think they’re rather charming-looking, the Burmese. They have such splendid bodies! Just think what sights you’d see in England if people went about half naked as they do here!“
„Gordon put his hand against the swing door. He even pushed it open a few inches. The warm fog of smoke and beer slipped through the crack. A familiar, reviving smell; nevertheless as he smelled it his nerve failed him. No! Impossible to go in. He turned away. He couldn’t go shoving into that saloon bar with only fourpence halfpenny in his pocket. Never let other people buy your drinks for you! The first commandment of the moneyless. He made off down the dark pavement.“
„Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said they had been in dirtier places.“
„Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.“
„There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it.“
„Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.“
„He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.“
„Ellis was one of those people who constantly nag others to echo their own opinions.“
„One cannot really be Catholic & grown-up.“
„The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail.“
„[Man] is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.“
„Not to have a national anthem would be logical.“
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