{"quotes":[{"text":"Nothing exists except through human consciousness.","author":"George Orwell","tags":["1984","consciousness","dystopia","fiction","george-orwell","human"],"id":1922,"author_id":"George+Orwell"},{"text":"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.","author":"George Orwell","tags":["1984","beautiful","beautiful-imagery","deep","different-worlds","dystopian-fiction","george-orwell"],"id":12159,"author_id":"George+Orwell"},{"text":"Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.","author":"George Orwell","tags":["george-orwell","write","writing"],"id":14161,"author_id":"George+Orwell"},{"text":"Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O'Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O'Brien: You do not exist.","author":"George Orwell","tags":["1984","big-brother","george","george-orwell","government","orwell"],"id":46286,"author_id":"George+Orwell"},{"text":"The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.","author":"George Orwell","tags":["1984","george-orwell","language","socialism","totalitarianism"],"id":49971,"author_id":"George+Orwell"},{"text":"Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.","author":"George Orwell","tags":["1984","big-brother","corruption","george-orwell","hope"],"id":84347,"author_id":"George+Orwell"},{"text":"Orwell's short and intense life has for years borne witness to some of those verities of which we were already aware. Parties and churches and states cannot be honest, but individuals can. Real books cannot be written by machines or committees. The truth is not always easy to discern, but a lie can and must be called by its right name. And the imagination, like certain wild animals, as Orwell himself once put it, will not breed in captivity. Actually, that last metaphor is beautiful but inaccurate. Even in the most dire conditions, there is a human will to resist coercion. We must believe that even now in North Korea, there are ideas alive inside human brains that were not put there by any authority.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["censorship","creativity","freedom","george-orwell","north-korea","politics"],"id":151711,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["apartheid","apoliticism","argument","atheism","berlin","bought-priesthood","cape-coloureds","cold-war","communism","conviction","critical-thinking","enlightenment","euphemism","eurocentricism","faith","film","george-hw-bush","george-orwell","german-people","germany","groupthink","hedonism","humanism","individualism","irony","journalism","left-wing-politics","lies","literary-criticism","literature","los-angeles","margaret-thatcher","monotheism","munich","orthodoxy","personality-politics","politics","polytheism","populism","postmodernism","potus","progress","radical-politics","religion","right-wing-politics","ronald-reagan","russia","science","sectarianism","self-love","self-pity","socialism","solipsism","south-africa","soviet-union","thomas-mann","totalitarianism","tribalism","truth","united-states","xhosa-people","zulu-people"],"id":151951,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues.","author":"Lionel Trilling","tags":["conservatism","gentlemen","george-orwell","politics","revolution"],"id":152071,"author_id":"Lionel+Trilling"},{"text":"If you want a vision of the future, imagine someone watching a boot stamping on a human face - forever...And ‘liking’ it.","author":"Dean Cavanagh","tags":["future","george-orwell"],"id":162133,"author_id":"Dean+Cavanagh"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":28,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}