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Quote by George Orwell

“Within certain limits, bad thought and bad morals can be good literature. If so great a man as Tolstoy could not demonstrate the contrary, I doubt whether anyone else can either.”

Quote by George Orwell

Work

Orwell on Truth

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Author

George Orwell
George Orwell

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was a British novelist and political critic. Known for his sharp social criticism and profound insights into totalitarianism, Orwell is best remembered for his novels '1984' and 'Animal Farm', which remain influential to this day. more

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“The commercial pressures, the forces urging us to buy and discard and buy again. When everything in public life has a logo attached to it, when every public space is disfigured with advertisements, when nothing if public value and importance can take place without commercial sponsorship, when schools and hospitals have to act as if their guiding principle were market forces rather than human need,..., when citizens become consumers and clients, patients, guests, students and passengers are all flattened into customers, what price the school of morals? The answer is: what it would fetch in the market, and not a penny more.”

“There is as little reason to speak of corruption in the political order as of perversion in the psychical order. Our entire mental universe may be said to be perverse: there are in it only defences and evasions, phantasms and duplicity, not to mention obsession and cruelty, ressentiment and the many different nuances of character. Everything about it is immoral. That is how it is, end of story. Any attempt at mental regulation is as pointless as the endeavour of moralizing the social world. The balance is always, as Mandeville rightly said, that of evil by evil. Ideas do not give forth light and their light source is elsewhere. But they have a shadow and that shadow moves with the sun.”

“I can't see a thousand years into the future, I told Her, so I can't see the nasty, evil outcome. What I can see is Master Prosper's horse, which is going to be amazingly beautiful. And thousands and millions of people who haven't even been born yet will look at that horse and hear about how it was made, even though it was impossible, and maybe it'll give them that little extra bit of strength and hope they need to persevere with scrambling up this shit heap we call life. And—I don't know. I really can't imagine what you've got up your sleeve that's so incredibly bad and horrible that Prosper's horse wouldn't have been worth it. From our perspective, I mean.”