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=IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS FROM __WHY I WRITE__ & __POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE__=
 * __Why I Write__**
 * "Every line of serious work that i have written since 1936 has been written, directly, or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."
 * "I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose. some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing."
 * "So as long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information."
 * "(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity."
 * "(iv) Political purpose... Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

__Politics and the English Language__
 * "If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."
 * "The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision...This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing."
 * "I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as n instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought."
 * "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the english language. It becomes ugly and innacurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the lovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
 * "Now, it is clear the the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer."

=IB HL ORWELL= 1. **Imperial conditioning, no escape from the machine of authority, no room for the individual voice.

"Marakech"**
 * "The flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later."
 * "They rise out of the earth, they swear and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil."
 * "Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies."
 * " A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightening speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job."
 * "None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day.."
 * "As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres."
 * "Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on it."
 * "Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women, bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it...."
 * "The peasants possess no harrows, they merely plough the soil several times over in different directions..."
 * "Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of them are tiny."
 * "She accepted her status as an old woman, that is to say as a beast of burden."
 * "For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood..."
 * "The Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be considered too much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter. After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold."
 * "Their splendid bodies were hidden in reach-me-down khaki uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that looked like blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too small."
 * "This wretched boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it."
 * "But there is one thought which every white man... thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?"
 * "And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper."

"Shooting an Elephant"
 * “suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all”
 * “The people expected if of me and I got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly”
 * “Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd –seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.”
 * “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”
 * “He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.”
 * “For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him.”
 * “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
 * “A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.”
 * “To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing –no, that was impossible.”
 * “And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”
 * “A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened.”
 * “…it was quite probable that they would laugh at me. That would never do.”
 * “They were going to have their bit of fun after all”
 * “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

"A Hanging" "Marrakech" "Shooting an Elephant" “A Hanging” “Marrakech” "Shooting an Elephant"
 * 2. The illusion of colonial power**
 * "Indian warders were guarding him...[standing] with rifles and fixed bayonets"
 * "a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles"
 * "the hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine"
 * "Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick"
 * "the warders unfixed bayonets and marched away"
 * "when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact."
 * "Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects?"
 * "This man is an employee of the Municipality"
 * "All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less invisible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous."
 * "What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in the government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil."
 * "This wretched boy...actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and he still believes it."
 * "But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they tum their guns in the other direction?""
 * "Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind fo secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see teh long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road"
 * "I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter."
 * "I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know taht it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it."
 * "It is always unneverving to have a crowd follow you"
 * "I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes--faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, certain that teh elephant was going to be shot...And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistably."
 * "It was at this moment...that I first grasphed the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; butin reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind."
 * "I percieved in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib"
 * "For it is this condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the "natives", and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."
 * "And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at."
 * "A white man mustn't be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do"
 * "I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."
 * 3. Inescapability of decay/death/depravity in colonized lands**
 * “A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard.”
 * “We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages.”
 * “In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.”
 * “He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man…”
 * “Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides.”
 * “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.”
 * “His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live.”
 * “He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone- one mind less, one world less.”
 * “The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram””
 * “The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number- fifty, perhaps, or a hundred.”
 * “Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.”
 * “It is not always so- oh, no! I have known cases where the doctor was obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull on the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!”
 * “As the corpse went past the files left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.”
 * “The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot.”
 * “When you walk through a town like this-two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in- when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings.”
 * “They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone.”
 * “And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.”
 * “…you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.”
 * “//I// could eat some of that bread.”
 * “…and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers like clouds of flies.”
 * “Down the center of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.”
 * “A carpenter sat cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape.”
 * “Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumor of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand.”
 * "Distressed areas"
 * "Starved countries of Africa and Asia"
 * "...back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil."
 * "Morocco is so desolate."
 * "A treeless waste"
 * "Soil is exactly like broken up brick"
 * "...the rare rainstorms there is never enough water."
 * "It seems to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women, when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the site of children." (decay)
 * "...old earth-colored bodies, reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight."
 * "...it suddenly drops dead, where upon its master tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have turned its guts out before it is cold."
 * "The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups..."
 * "The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it." (depravity)
 * "It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm leaf, winding all over a steep hillside."
 * "I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes."

5. Laboured earth 6. Human labour and the labouring masses** "Marrakech"
 * 4. Verbs of oppressed movement for the indigenous
 * "two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in"
 * "They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds"
 * "In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves."
 * "A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job."
 * "All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are."
 * "Everything is done by hand. Lone lines of women, bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across teh fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each stalk."
 * "One day a poor old creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load of wood."
 * "But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs, I cannot truly say that I had seen them."

->**"A Hanging" “A Hanging” "Shooting an Elephant"
 * 7. Pathetic status of the indigenous
 * "In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them."
 * "He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague and liquid eyes."
 * "He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films"
 * "It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening."
 * "I watched the bare brown backs of the prisoner marching in front of me."
 * "He greeted us wit ha servile crouch as we entered"
 * 8. Concentration on inanimate details to portray typical colonial view that does not focus on the natives**
 * “And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.”
 * “All the organs of his body were working- bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming- all toiling away in solemn foolery."
 * "...labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts..."
 * "...cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains."
 * "...a miry waste of paddy fields..."
 * "...not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with course grass."

"Marrakech"
 * “The little crowd of mourners- all men and boys, no women- threaded their way across the market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short chant over and over again.”
 * “What really appeals to the files is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden vier on the shoulders of four friends.”
 * “Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects?”
 * “…and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies.”
 * “Down the center of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.”
 * “In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don’t even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one’s eyes takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same color as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.”
 * "Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits."
 * "But what is strange about these people is their invisibility."
 * "Firewood was passing--that was how I saw it."
 * "People with brown skins are next door to invisible."

“Shooting an Elephant”
 * “I was hated by large numbers of people”
 * “When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter.”
 * “In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere”
 * “The young Buddhist priests…several thousands of them in the town”
 * “the grey, cowed faces of long-term convicts”
 * “the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos”
 * “my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible”
 * “an ever-growing army of people”
 * “sea of yellow faces above the yellow the garish clothes”
 * “their two thousand wills”
 * “the unarmed native crowd”
 * “will of those yellow faces”
 * “those two thousand Burmans”
 * “happy sigh…breathed from innumerable throats”
 * “The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing”
 * “because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie”


 * "No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind."
 * "Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind pf undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects?"
 * "They rise our of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil."
 * "All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less invisible thy are."
 * "In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don't even see him."
 * "In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at."
 * "But where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed."
 * "One could probably live here for years without noticing that for none-tenths of the people the reality of lie is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil."
 * "I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be violating a law of nature."
 * "But what is strange about these people is their invisibility."
 * "... and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing-- that was how I saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies..."
 * "People with brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks."