"Homage to Catalonia" Quotes
George Orwell recounts his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War and his disillusionment with the political factions involved.
history | 232 pages | Published in NaN
Quotes
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
The most bitter negative to emerge from the Russian War was the growth of a sense of futility.
The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality.
I have no particular love for the idealized 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.
Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
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.
