Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor.
It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
El ataque directo y consciente contra la honradez intelectual procede de los propios intelectuales.
Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at.
And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.
To prevent us from shooting each other in the darkness white armlets would be worn. At this moment a messenger arrived to say that there were no white armlets.
Modern man is rather like a bisected wasp which goes on sucking jam and pretends that the loss of its abdomen does not matter.
A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors.
The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say. It’s the only way to be safe.
Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products. The throw-outs of the money-god. All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description: creeping like unclean beetles to the grave.
3.6.40: From a letter from Lady Oxford15 to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies: “Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining... in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.” Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exist.
War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair.
Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government.
He is simply a hole in the air.
In Paris, if you had no money and could not find a public bench, you would sit on the pavement. Heaven knows what sitting on the pavement would lead to in London-prison probably.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.
All European food in Burma is more or less disgusting – the bread is spongy stuff leavened with palm-toddy and tasting like a penny bun gone wrong, the butter comes out of a tin, and so does the milk, unless it is the grey watery catlap of the dudh-wallah.
The fact is that the Salvation Army are so in the habit of thinking themselves a charitable body that they cannot even run a lodging-house without making it stink of charity.