Sunday, October 01, 2006

Orwell.

Somebody recently quoted these words of George Orwell in 1984 as part of a larger piece : "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. ...We are different from the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites., The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to us in our methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."

'New' Caravaggio on Display.

  “Caravaggio can freeze a moment — it’s hypnotic, magnetic and it’s coming home,” said Paola Nicita, an art historian who worked on the loa...