George Orwell: Frasi in inglese (pagina 17)

“If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican, you often ﬁnd yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally.”

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George Orwell

As I Please (1943–1947)

“An earthquake is such fun when it is over.”

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George Orwell libro Giorni in Birmania

Origine: Burmese Days (1934), Ch. XV

“Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”

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George Orwell

Letter to H. J. Willmett (18 May 1944), published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945 (2000), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus https://books.google.com/books?id=fCRLPIbLP8IC&lpg=PA149&dq=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&pg=PA149#v=onepage&q=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&f=false

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”

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George Orwell libro Coming Up for Air

Coming Up for Air, Part I, Ch. 4 (1939)

“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.”

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George Orwell libro Fiorirà l'aspidistra

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

“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.”

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George Orwell libro Down and Out in Paris and London

Origine: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 7

“Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them … it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine.”

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George Orwell libro Giorni in Birmania

John Flory, Ch. III
Burmese Days (1934)

“Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. 'Don't talk to me about the lower classes,' she used to say. 'I hate them. They smell.”

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George Orwell libro Fiorirà l'aspidistra

And Ravelston adored her.
Origine: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 5

“Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.”

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George Orwell

"What is Science?" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien, Tribune (26 October 1945)

“Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.[http://alexpeak.com/twr/oateotc/]</sup”

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George Orwell

As I Please (1943–1947)

“Paddy and I had scarcely a wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some nervous trouble, shell-shock perhaps, which made him cry out 'Pip!' at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise, something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of sleep…. he must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. He was an example of the kind of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep when men are herded as they are in these lodging houses.”

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George Orwell libro Down and Out in Paris and London

Origine: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 29

“No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.”

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George Orwell

"Such, Such Were The Joys" http://orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys (May 1947); published in Partisan Review (September/October 1952)

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

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George Orwell

"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," Tribune (12 April 1946, page 10, last paragraph http://archive.tribunemagazine.co.uk/page/12th-april-1946/10)

“The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system.”

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George Orwell

"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Charles Dickens (1939)

“Everyone always did miss everyone else in this war, whenever it was humanly possible to do so.”

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George Orwell libro Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”

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George Orwell libro Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.”

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George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (28 January 1944)<sup> http://www.telelib.com/words/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/tribune/AsIPlease19440128.html</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

“One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.”

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George Orwell

Review of The Freedom of the Streets by Jack Common, June 1938, pp. 335-6

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle … There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

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George Orwell libro Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

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George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (4 February 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/hiwbtw/</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)