In My Opinion Nothing Has Contributed More

In Our Time, Political Speech And Writing Are Largely The Defense Of The Indefensible. Things Like The Continuance Of British Rule In India, The Russian Purges And Deportations, The Dropping Of The Atom Bombs On Japan, Can Indeed Be Defended, But Only By Arguments Which Are Too Brutal For Most People To Face, And Which Do Not Square With The Professed Aims Of The Political Parties. Thus Political Language Has To Consist Largely Of Euphemism, Question-begging And Sheer Cloudy Vagueness.

The Atmosphere Of Orthodoxy Is Always Damaging To Prose, And Above All It Is Completely Ruinous To The Novel, The Most Anarchical Of All Forms Of Literature.

In This Country, Intellectual Cowardice Is The Worst Enemy A Writer Or Journalist Has To Face ... Unpopular Ideas Can Be Silenced, And Incovenient Facts Kept Dark, Without The Need For Any Official Ban ... At Any Given Moment There Is An Orthodoxy, A Body Of Iedas Which It Is Assumed That All Right-thinking People Will Accept Without Question.

When You Meet Anyone In The Flesh You Realize Immediately That He Is A Human Being And Not A Sort Of Caricature Embodying Certain Ideas. It Is Partly For This Reason That I Don't Mix Much In Literary Circles, Because I Know From Experience That Once I Have Met And Spoken To Anyone I Shall Never Again Be Able To Feel Any Intellectual Brutality Towards Him, Even When I Feel I Ought To - Like The Labour M.p.s Who Get Patted On The Back By Dukes And Are Lost Forever More.

And In The General Hardening Of Outlook That Set In ... Practices Which Had Been Long Abandoned ... -- Imprisonment Without Trial, The Use Of War Prisoners As Slaves, Public Executions, Torture To Extract Confessions, The Use Of Hostages And The Deportation Of Whole Populations -- Not Only Became Common Again, But Were Tolerated And Even Defended By People Who Considered Themselves Enlightened And Progressive.