George Orwell: Citáty anglicky (strana 20)

“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.”

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George Orwell kniha Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Zdroj: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 4

“Acceptance of the Catholic position implies a certain willingness to see the present injustices of society continue… Individual salvation implies liberty, which is always extended by Catholic writers to include the right to private property. But in the stage of industrial development which we have now reached, the right to private property means the right to exploit and torture millions of one's fellow creatures. The Socialist would argue, therefore, that one can only defend property if one is more or less indifferent to economic justice.”

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George Orwell

Zdroj: Review of Communism and Man by F. J. Sheed in Peace News (27 January 1939)

“Decline of the English Murder”

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George Orwell

Essay http://orwell.ru/library/articles/decline/english/e_doem title, Tribune (15 February 1946)

“One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.”

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George Orwell kniha Politics and the English Language

footnote 3
Politics and the English Language (1946)

“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.”

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George Orwell kniha Burmese Days

Zdroj: Burmese Days (1934), Ch. V

“There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.”

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George Orwell kniha Down and Out in Paris and London

Zdroj: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 4; a record of a remark by Orwell's fellow tramp Boris

“The revolutionary atmosphere remained as I had first known it. General and private, peasant and militiaman, still met as equals; everyone drew the same pay, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, and called everyone else 'thou' and 'comrade'; there was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching. I was breathing the air of equality, and I was simple enough to imagine that it existed all over Spain. I did not realize that more or less by chance I was isolated among the most revolutionary section of the Spanish working class.”

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George Orwell kniha Homage to Catalonia

Zdroj: Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“No need to repeat the blasphemous comments which everyone who had known Gran'pa Comstock made on that last sentence. But it is worth pointing out that the chunk of granite on which it was inscribed weighed close on five tons and was quite certainly put there with the intention, though not the conscious intention, of making sure that Gran'pa Comstock shouldn't get up from underneath it. If you want to know what a dead man's relatives really think of him, a good rough test is the weight of his tombstone.”

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George Orwell kniha Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Zdroj: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 3

“One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.”

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George Orwell kniha Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Zdroj: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 10

“[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.”

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George Orwell

As I Please (1943–1947)

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-ﬁghting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

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George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (24 March 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/wif/
As I Please (1943–1947)

“We have a hunger for something like authenticity, but are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile.”

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George Orwell

Actually a statement by Miles Orvell, in The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (1989)
Misattributed

“A phrase much used in political circles in this country is "playing into the hands of". It is a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths. When you are told that by saying this, that or the other you are "playing into the hands of" some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately.”

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George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (9 June 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/tpithoa/
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

“But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one—not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”

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George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (24 March 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/wif/
"As I Please" (1943–1947)

“Being a beggar, he said, was not his fault, and he refused either to have any compunction about it or to let it trouble him. He was the enemy of society, and quite ready to take to crime if he saw a good opportunity. He refused on principle to be thrifty. In the summer he saved nothing, spending his surplus earnings on drink, as he did not care about women. If he was penniless when winter came on, then society must look after him. He was ready to extract every penny he could from charity, provided that he was not expected to say thank you for it. He avoided religious charities, however, for he said it stuck in his throat to sing hymns for buns. He had various other points of honour; for instance, it was his boast that never in his life, even when starving, had he picked up a cigarette end. He considered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be ungrateful.”

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George Orwell kniha Down and Out in Paris and London

On "Bozo", in Ch. 30
Down and out in Paris and London (1933)

“Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it.”

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George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (11 August 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/
As I Please (1943–1947)

“[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”

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George Orwell

From a review of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, New English Weekly (21 March 1940)

“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.”

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George Orwell kniha Down and Out in Paris and London

Zdroj: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 21; on the state of the kitchen at the newly opened Auberge.

“It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.”

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George Orwell

"Second Thoughts on James Burnham," Polemic (summer 1946)

“Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.”

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George Orwell

Review of Tropic of Cancer, in New English Weekly (14 November 1935)