George Orwell: 1984
Reader Submission: Title and Redesign by Alex Watson.
I Hate Rats More Than I Love My Girlfriend.
I’m dead.
i guess that’s one way to look at it …
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.
— 1984, George Orwell (via philphys)
(via inkflowers)
The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ and saying that ‘these men could find work if they wanted to,’ and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves.
—
The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell
(via merrycrassmas)Welcome to 1928, not much unlike from 2012
Day #60: 1984
Take, for instance, the fact that the working class think nothing of getting married on the dole. It annoys old ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense; they realize that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being… Life is still fairly normal, more normal than one really has the right to expect. Families are impoverished, but the family-system is not broken up. The people are in effect living a reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.
— The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell (via merrycrassmas)
Happy MANday: George Orwell
As suggested by Nora.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar L o w n e s s of poverty that you discover first: the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crustwiping.
— George Orwell — Down and Out in Paris and London (via timeislaundry)
