Life & Wisdom Quote by George Orwell

Nationalism, for Orwell, is the dirty little engine behind supposedly noble sentiments: the desire to dominate, wrapped in a story that lets the dominator sleep at night. “Power hunger” names the impulse bluntly, stripping away the romantic varnish of flags, folk songs, and “heritage.” The clincher is “tempered by self-deception,” a phrase that captures how modern political passion survives contact with reality. People don’t just want their side to win; they need to believe their wanting is moral, inevitable, even altruistic.

The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that nationalism is merely love of home. Orwell turns it into a psychological technology: a way to convert appetite into virtue. “Tempered” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests not an antidote but a stabilizer, like a chemical additive that makes a volatile substance usable. Self-deception doesn’t weaken power hunger; it refines it, makes it socially portable, easier to share, easier to chant.

Context matters. Orwell wrote in the shadow of the 20th century’s mass politics, when propaganda, total war, and ideological camps taught citizens to treat facts as optional and cruelty as patriotic. His own trajectory-from imperial policeman to anti-fascist fighter to critic of Stalinism-made him allergic to movements that demand moral exemption. The subtext is a warning about the intimacy between identity and aggression: once politics becomes a story about “us” as righteousness incarnate, any act can be framed as defense, and every doubt becomes betrayal.