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"Torturing innocents, murdering civilians and destroying public property; they are all the gifts we have been given by religion."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Some lurid things have been said about me-that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth-that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We know of no spectacle more ridiculous-or more contemptible-than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth."
Author Name
Personal Development
"All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding--shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Hater" and "hate" are used when no critical thought can be formed. We can definitely do better."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Only a man of knowledge is capable of giving constructive criticism."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"In his entire output, I can find only one piece of genuine unfairness: a thuggish attack on the poetry of WH Auden, whom he regarded as a dupe of the Communist Party. But even this was softened in some later essays. The truth is that he disliked Auden's homosexuality, and could not get over his prejudice. But much of the interest of Orwell lies in the fact that he was born prejudiced, so to speak, against Jews and the coloured peoples of the empire, and against the poor and uneducated, and against women and intellectuals-and managed, in a transparent and unique way, to educate himself out of this fog of bigotry (though he never did get over his aversion to 'pansies')."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Our streets are littered with university graduates holding paper certificates and looking for a way to enslave themselves again under a boss in the name of looking for a job."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions."
People
"Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists."
Quality
"Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony."
Nature
"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume."
People
"The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people."
People
"I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system."
Thought
"In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival."
Survival
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."
Democracy
"Reigning doctrines are often called a "double standard".The term is misleading.It is more accurate to describe them as a single standard,clear and unmistakable,the standard that Adam Smith called the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: ...All for ourselves,and nothing for other people." Much has changed since his day,but the vile maxim flourishes."
Morality
"The close Turkish-Israeli relations go back to the late 1950s - military intelligence, commercial, more recently, tourism and cultural relations."
Diplomacy
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