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“A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think”

Anti Work
Book:Down and Out in Paris and London
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“No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as JOYCAMP (forced-labour camp) or MINIPAX Minis- try of Peace, i.e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous un- derstanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was PROLEFEED, meaning the rubbishy enter- tainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.”

ProletariatFake NewsControling The MassesProlefeed
Book:1984
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“I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.”

PatriotismLeft WingIntellectualsIntelligentsia
Author:George Orwell
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“Ti rendi conto che il passato, compreso quello più recente, è stato abolito? Se mai sopravvive da qualche parte, è in oggetti concreti e privi di un nome che li definisca, come quel pezzo di vetro. Noi già non sappiamo praticamente nulla della Rivoluzione e degli anni che l'hanno preceduta. Tutti i documenti sono stati distrutti o falsificati, tutti i libri riscritti, tutti i quadri dipinti da capo, tutte le statue, le strade e gli edifici cambiati di nome, tutte le date alterate, e questo processo è ancora in corso, giorno dopo giorno, minuto dopo minuto. La storia si è fermata. Non esiste altro che un eterno presente nel quale il Partito ha sempre ragione.”

1984PassatoDistopiaStoriaCensura
Book:1984
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“A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy - that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot.”

Class StruggleSnobberyParochialism
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
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“Şimdi bir anlamda "sol" olmayan bir entelijansiyanın var olmadığı belirtilmeli. Son sağcı entelektüel belki de T. E. Lawrence'tı. Yaklaşık 1930'dan beri, "entelektüel" olarak tanımlanacak herkes var olan düzenden müzmin, memnuniyetsiz halde yaşıyor. Böyle de olmak zorunda, çünkü kurulmuş olduğu haliyle toplumda ona yer yok. Tamamen durağan olan, ne gelişen ne de parçalarına ayrılan bir imparatorlukta ve temel becerisi aptallığı olan insanlar tarafından yönetilen bir İngiltere'de "zeki" olmak şüphelidir. T.S. Eliot'ın şiirlerini ve Karl Marx'ın teorilerini anlayabilecek türden bir beyniniz varsa, üst kademedekiler her tür önemli işten uzak tutulmanızı sağlar. Entelektüeller, kendilerine yalnızca edebiyat eleştirmenliğinde ve sol siyasi partilerde bir görev edinebilirler.”

MarxSolÇEviriLevent KoncaNeden YazıyorumLawrenceEleştiriEntelijansiyaSiyasi Parti
Book:Why I Write
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“İngiliz sol entelijansiyasının zihniyeti, yarım düzine haftalık ve aylık dergiden öğrenilebilir. Tüm bu dergiler hakkında hemen göze çarpan şey genelde olumsuz, mızmız tutumları; yapıcı önerilerden daima ve tamamen yoksun olmalarıdır. Buralarda, asla iktidar konumunda olamamış, asla da olmayacak insanların sorumsuz şikayetleri dışında pek az şey vardır. Diğer bir dikkat çekici karakteristik özellikleri, fikirler dünyasında yaşayan insanların duygusal anlamda çok sığ olmaları ve fiziksel gerçeklikle çok az temasları olmasıdır.”

SolFikirDüşünceÇEviriNeden YazıyorumIktidarEntelektüelEntelijansiyaZihniyetLevet Konca
Book:Why I Write
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“İngiliz entelijansiyası hiç olmazsa hedefleri açısından Avrupalılaştırılmış. Aşçılıklarını Paris'ten, fikirleriniyse Moskova'dan alıyorlar. Ülkelerinin genel vatanseverliğinde bir çeşit karşıt görüş adacığı oluşturuyorlar. İngiltere, belki de, entelektüelleri milliyetlerinden utanan yegane büyük ülkedir. Sol çevrelerde daima, İngiliz olmanın hafif utanılacak bir şey olduğu ve at yarışından içyağı pudingine her İngiliz geleneği ile dalga geçmenin bir görev olduğu hissedildi. Neredeyse her İngiliz entelektüelin, bir sadaka kutusundan para çalmaktan değil de, "Tanrı Kraliçeyi Korusun" sırasında hazırolda durmaktan daha çok utanacak olması garip bir olgu, ama aynı zamanda tartışmasız olarak doğru. Tüm o hassas yıllar boyunca çok sayıda solcu kimi zaman aşırı pasifist, kimi zaman şiddetle Rusya yanlısı, ama daima Britanya karşıtı bir görüşü yaymaya çalışarak İngilizlerin ahlâkını bozuyordu. Bunun ne kadar etkili olduğu tartışılabilir, ama kesinlikle belirli bir etkisi olmuştur.”

SolÇEviriLevent KoncaMilliyetçilikVatanseverlikBritanyaRusyaİNgiliz Sol Entelijansiyası
Book:Why I Write
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“İngiliz sol entelijansiyasının zihniyeti, yarım düzine haftalık ve aylık dergiden öğrenilebilir. Tüm bu dergiler hakkında hemen göze çarpan şey genelde olumsuz, mızmız tutumları; yapıcı önerilerden daima ve tamamen yoksun olmalarıdır. Buralarda, asla iktidar konumunda olamamış, asla da olmayacak insanların sorumsuz şikayetleri dışında pek az şey vardır. Diğer bir dikkat çekici karakteristik özellikleri, fikirler dünyasında yaşayan insanların duygusal anlamda çok sığ olmaları ve fiziksel gerçeklikle çok az temasları olmasıdır. Çoğu sol entelektüel, 1935'e kadar pasifistlerdi, 1935-1939 yılları arasında Almanya'ya karşı savaş çığlıkları attılar ve savaş başladığında derhal yatıştılar. İspanya İç Savaşı sırasında en "anti-faşist" olanların şimdi en yenilgici olanlar olduğu düşüncesi yaygın olsa da, tam olarak doğru değil. Ve bunun altında İngiliz entelijansiyasından pek çok isim hakkındaki önemli bir olgu yatıyor: Ülkenin ortak kültürüyle olan bağlarını koparmış olmaları.”

SolÇEviriİNgiltereİKinci Dünya SavaşıSol Entelijansiya
Book:Why I Write
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“Fakat iki savaş arasındaki yıllar boyunca hem devrimci hem de uygulanabilir bir sosyalist program çıkmadı; çünkü temelde kimse büyük bir değişimin olmasını istemiyordu. İşçi Partisi liderleri, maaşlarını alıp belirli aralıklarla Muhafazakarlarla görev değiş tokuşu yaparak hayatlarına devam etmek istiyorlardı. Komünistler konforlu bir şekilde eziyet görüp, sonsuz yenilgilerle karşılaşıp, ardından suçu başkalarına atarak hayatlarına devam etmek istiyorlardı. Sol entelijansiya, Blimpler ile gülüp dalga geçerek, orta sınıf ahlakının altını oyup yine de en sevdikleri hissedarların çanak yalayıcısı konumunu koruyarak hayatına devam etmek istiyordu. İşçi Partisi'nin politikaları, muhafazakarlığın bir biçimine, "devrimci" politikaya inanıyormuş gibi yapma oyununa dönüşmüştü.”

SolÇEviriLevent KoncaNeden YazıyorumKonforIşçi PartisiKomünistMuhafazakarlık
Book:Why I Write
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“After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still" (51).”

LanguageSimplification1984Newspeak
Book:1984
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“The capitalist-imperialist governments, even though they themselves are about to be plundered, will not fight with any conviction against Fascism as such. Our rulers, those of them who understand the issue, would probably prefer to hand over every square inch of the British Empire to Italy, Germany, and Japan than to see Socialism triumphant. It was easy to laugh at Fascism when we imagined that it was based on hysterical nationalism, because it seemed obvious that the Fascist states, each regarding itself as the chosen people and patriotic contra mundum, would clash with one another. But nothing of the kind is happening. Fascism is now an international movement, which means not only that the Fascist nations can combine for the purposes of loot, but that they are groping, perhaps only half consciously as yet, toward a world-system. For the vision of the totalitarian state there is being substituted the vision of the totalitarian world. As I pointed out earlier, the advance of machine-technique must lead ultimately to some form of collectivism, but that form need not necessarily be equalitarian; that is, it need not be Socialism. Pace the economists, it is quite possible to imagine a world-society, economically collectivist–that is, with the profit principle eliminated–but will all political, military, and educational power in the hands of a small caste of rulers and their bravos. That or something like it is the objective of Fascism. And that, of course, is the slave-state, or rather the slave-world; it would probably be a stable form of society, and the chances are, considering the enormous wealth of the world if scientifically exploited, that the slaves would be well-fed and contented.”

SocialismFascismElitesTotalitarianismWorld GovernmentLate Capitalism
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
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“Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey−fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean−mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”

ConformityFanaticismGender DifferencesRadicalization
Author:George Orwell
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“Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are some-times told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class–a sort of 'bread and circuses' business–to hold the unemployed down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, buy by an un-conscious process–the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer's need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.”

CapitalismWorking ClassMass ProductionLuxuries
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
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“Gissing did not, at least consciously, even want to be the kind of writer that he was. His ideal, a rather melancholy one, was to have a moderate private income and live in a small comfortable house in the country, preferably unmarried, where he could wallow in books, especially the Greek and Latin classics. He might perhaps have realised this ideal if he had not managed to get himself into prison immediately after winning an Oxford scholarship: as it was he spent his life in what appeared to him to be hack work, and when he had at last reached the point where he could stop writing against the clock, he died almost immediately, aged only about forty-five. His death, described by H.G. Wells in his Experiment in Autobiography, was of a piece with his life. The twenty novels, or thereabouts, that he produced between 1880 and 1900 were, so to speak, sweated out of him during his struggle towards a leisure which he never enjoyed and which he might not have used to good advantage if he had had it: for it is difficult to believe that his temperament really fitted him for a life of scholarly research. Perhaps the natural pull of his gifts would in any case have drawn him towards novel writing sooner or later. If not, we must be thankful for the piece of youthful folly which turned him aside from a comfortable middle-class career and forced him to become the chronicler of vulgarity, squalor and failure.”

Literary CriticismGeorge Gissing
Book:Collected Works
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“But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.”

Revisionist History
Book:1984
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“The industrial towns of the North are ugly because they happen to have been built at a time when modern methods of steel-construction and smoke-abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy making money to think about anything else. ...But since the war, industry has tended to shift southward and in doing so has grown almost comely. The typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack or an awful chaos of blackness and belching chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of concrete, glass and steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. ...As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods.”

Industrialism
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
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“He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.”

BeautyTotalitarianismPaperweight
Book:1984
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“The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.”

Class StrugglePolitical Struggle1948
Book:1984
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“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and from, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this 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...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.”

CapitalismLibertarianSocialismAnarchismLibertarian SocialismAnarcho Syndicalism
Book:Homage to Catalonia
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“As for the problem of overproduction, which has been latent in our society since the development of the machine technique, it is solved by the device of continuous warfare, which is also useful in keying up public morale to the necessary pitch. ... The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously molding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way.”

WarEducationSocietyMoraleMassesOverprotection
Book:1984
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“In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies… Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he’s in the right.”

WritingTruthLiteratureLibertyCensorshipTotalitarianismPolitical CorrectnessLeftismPublishing Industry
Book:The Prevention of Literature
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“What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.”

ReligionMoneyRevolutionControlSymbolic
Book:Keep the Aspidistra Flying
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“I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.”

SocialismPierWitan
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
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“Sobrellevaba con dignidad esa vida absurda de oficinista porque sabía que no sería para siempre. No sabía cómo ni cuándo, eso estaba en manos de Dios, pero tenía el convencimiento de que en algún momento podría librarse de sus ataduras. Después de todo, siempre podía . Tal vez algún día, incluso, llegara a ganarse la vida escribiendo y entonces sería totalmente libre del olor nauseabundo del dinero.”

EscribirEscritorVida De Escritor
Book:Keep the Aspidistra Flying
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“When a quarter of a million miners are unemployed, it is a part of the order of things that Alf Smith, a miner living in the back-streets of Newcastle, should be out of work. But no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit. So long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a failure.”

PoliticsEconomicsSociologyPolemicsSocial History
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
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“All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold,or do not hold, is looked on as matter of indifference. They can me granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.”

EducationLibertyIntellectRebellionTrue NatureMystique
Book:1984
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