Sublime

In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.

Des centaines de structures subsistent qui devaient disparaître. Des agents s’occupent de tâches inutiles. La règle envahit tout, parce qu’il est plus commode d’écrire une loi ou un décret que d’indiquer une direction. Les fonctionnaires y trouvent une raison d’être et les politiques une occasion de justifier leurs privilèges. Le statut pris en lui

Le plus grand crime perpétré dans ce nouveau monde est l’éradication de la passion et la réduction au silence de l’individu.

Orwell concludes that “this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity”—and also, one might add, social conformity. Orwell is quite right to call it a “reduced state of consciousness”: to borrow once again Daniel Kahneman’s language, it is as though complex questions that ought to be acti

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

la protection contre la tyrannie du magistrat ne suffit pas. La société ayant la tendance 1° d’imposer comme règles de conduite, par d’autres moyens que les peines civiles, ses idées et ses coutumes à ceux qui s’en écartent, 2° d’empêcher le développement et autant que possible la formation de toute individualité distincte, 3° d’obliger tous les ca

Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it. During the campaign of 2016, Americans

“Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Neil Postman wrote: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell