George Orwell: Frasi in inglese (pagina 21)

“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”

“I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.”

“Let a politician die, and his worst enemies will stand up on the floor of the House and utter pious lies in his honour, but a writer or artist must be sniffed at, at least if he is any good.”

“Gordon and his friends had quite an exciting time with their 'subversive ideas'. For a whole year they ran an unofficial monthly paper called the Bolshevik, duplicated with jellygraph. It advocated Socialism, free love, the dismemberment of the British Empire, the abolition of the Army and Navy, and so on and so forth. It was great fun. Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.”

“Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.”

“There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side commits it.”

“But is it really necessary, in 1947, to teach children to use expressions like "native" and "Chinaman"?”

“No one I met at this time — doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients — failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”

“Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.”

“One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.”

“He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.”

“He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal.”

“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.”

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

“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.”

“Ellis was one of those people who constantly nag others to echo their own opinions.”

“At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not.”

“Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines.”

“An immense amount, enough to fill many books, has already been written on the subject [of the Barcelona fighting], and I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of it is untruthful.”