“[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.” George Orwell (31 December 1943)
“Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”
“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.”
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
“The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”
“Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.”
I guess welcome to the age of schizophrenia. For those who are interested, his membership of the Fabian Society is key to understanding how he was so spot on about today's world (eg: planned). Wolf in sheeps clothing indeed.
https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=FabianSociety&C...