P.1 This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber
truncheons, atomic bombs, etc. are what we daily think about, and
therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name
them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your
thoughts will be about sinking ships.
P.2 …because we have developed a sort of compunction which our
grandfathers did not have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and
misery of the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be
doing something about it, which makes a purely aesthetic attitude towards
life impossible.
P.14 The light must never go out.
⠀The music must always play,
⠀Lest we should see where we are,
P.51 But what it could not do was to describe a place or condition in
which the ordinary human being actively wanted to be. … Perhaps the most
vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which
Tertulliam explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the
tortures of the damned.
P.54 At this moment, for instance, the world is at war and wants peace.
Yet the world has no experience of peace’s dn never has had, unless the
Noble Savage once existed. The world wants something which it is dimly
aware could exist, but which it cannot accurately define.
⠀Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has
toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having
toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless
continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was
temporary.
P.75 I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies
anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part
inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the
abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
P.76 We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our
traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that
it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really
happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right
invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively
that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance,
is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow
destroy itself.
P.85 All that the working man demands is what these others would consider
the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all.
Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the
knowledge that you children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day,
clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough
working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not
one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life liveable
without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we
chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard
of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater
undertaking than the war we are now fighting. I don’t claim, and I don’t
know who does, that that would solve anything in itself. It is merely that
privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems
of humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of
the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the
average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of
the secret police. How right the working class are in their ‘materialism’!
How high they are to realise that the belly comes before the soul, not in
the scale of values but in point of time!