It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past and like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
Down, down! Into the ghost kingdom, out of the reach of hope, out of the reach of fear! Under ground, under ground! That was where he wished to be.
The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.
You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.
As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.
Los mejores libros son los que nos dicen lo que ya sabemos.
I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts.
On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet – everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed – no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.
In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it runs like a connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it.
The best brothel-scenes in literature have been written, without exception, by pious believers or pious unbelievers.
It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do.
Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted.
Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you; not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.
The problem, that is to say, is educational. It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it. The consciousness of the masses needs only to be influenced in a negative way. Given.
We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue.
La historia era un palimpsesto, borrado y reescrito tantas veces como fuese necesario.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
Four legs good, two legs bad.’ This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism.
In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain.
We are the dead,” he said. “We’re not dead yet,” said Julia prosaically. “Not physically. Six months, a year – five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.