Wednesday, 12 February 2014

One does not advertise ideas as though they were laxatives or toothpaste

'One does not advertise ideas as though they were laxatives or toothpaste,' said the Emperor Karl, last of the Hapsburg Emperors of Austria-Hungary - a mistaken opinion which was one of the contributory causes of his own downfall and the disintegration of an empire which had endured (in various forms) for a millennium.

L. Hughes - Hallet, The Pike (2013), 382

Tuesday, 11 February 2014

And the newspapers someone dares to be happy because there were no human victims!

He [Nietzsche] was an aesthete, and not only in a green-carnation-wearing, stained-glass fancying sense of the word. He was one who valued beauty far higher than justice or human kindness, D'Annunzio would respond in the same spirit to the collapse of the campanile in Venice's Piazza San Marco in 1902.He was prostrated by grief, weeping, and pacing from room to room all day, unable to work. 'And the newspapers someone dares to be happy because there were no human victims!' To him the pain and death of his fellow beings would have been insignificant, by comparison with the loss of an harmonious architectural ensemble. 'Innumerable human victims would not be enough to compensate.'

L. Hughes - Hallet, The Pike (2013), 237

Monday, 10 February 2014

It is, he claims, the battle yell of Achilles

Twelve days earlier,  d'Annunzio, ever attentive to the ritual of warfare,  has taught his squadron a new battle cry. Instead of the 'Ip, Ip, Ip, Urrah!' which he finds crude and barbarous,  he has ordered them to shout the Greek: 'Eia, Eia, Eia, Alala!' It is, he claims, the battle yell of Achilles.

L. Hughes-Hallet, The Pike (2013), 38

Friday, 7 February 2014

The only non-royal people slightly superior, in his eyes, to the rank and file of his subjects, were dukes

Père Tellier,a Jesuit who came to be loathed so much that he was perhaps chiefly responsible for the expulsion of his Order from France. A sort of Rasputin, with ardent, black eyes in a false, terrible face, ignorant and wildly ambitious, he was a peasant and boasted of it to the King, who was unimpressed since in his eyes the peasantry and the bourgeoisie rated exactly the same - the only non-royal people slightly superior, in his eyes, to the rank and file of his subjects, were dukes.

N. Mitford, The Sun King (1966), 222-223

Tuesday, 4 February 2014

He had three further reasons for disliking the Dutch: the republicanism which seemed ingrained in their character, their Protestantism and their pamphlets

Co-operation with the Dutch did occur to Louis. he offered his daughter Marie-Anne to be the wife of William of Orange and received a humiliating rebuff. William said that in his family one married the legitimate daughters of kings, not their bastards. ... Louis XIV, always touchy on the subject of his illegitimate family, never forgave William the insult. He had three further reasons for disliking the Dutch: the republicanism which seemed ingrained in their character, their Protestantism and their pamphlets. His own press was strictly censored, but disagreeable observations on himself, his policy and his family never stopped coming off the printing presses of The Hague and Amsterdam.

N. Mitford, The Sun King (1966), 19

Tuesday, 28 January 2014

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. 

G. Orwell, 'Notes on nationalism' (1945), in Essays (1984), 312

Monday, 27 January 2014

They went to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it

But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. It was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and — at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts — a Fuehrer.

G. Orwell, 'Inside the Whale' (1940), in Essays (1984), 121-2

I think 'Inside the Whale' is my favourite of all of Orwell's essays, certainly of the political ones. To be honest people should just read the whole thing