"New Concept English"

[fiefoe]

Book IV Lesson 10
    In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The manipulated do not understand them; the manipulators fear them. The tidy committee men regard them with horror, knowing that no pigeonholes can be found for them.
We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative.
The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society, capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.
Between mid-night and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.
The twin ideals of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.

Beauty in terms of our human meanings is meaningless.

Book IV Lesson 37
    Of all forms of arrant untruthfulness Victorian optimism appears to me to have been the most cowardly and the most damaging. Truth, therefore, is an attitude of the mind. Convenience is, however, in all affairs of life, an execrable test of value.
One should have the courage to think uncomfortably, since it is only by rejecting the convenient that one can come to think the truth. Not, after all, that there is any such thing as truth. At best we can approach to some relative approximation.
On the other hand, there is surely such a thing as untruth.

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