I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English โeducationโ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school โ I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet โ but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.
George OrwellIn so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
George OrwellThe secret of rulership is to combine a belief in oneโs own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.
George OrwellPolitical chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
George OrwellThey were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
George OrwellThe point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
George Orwell