It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement.
She was italicising every other word, with that deadly, glittering brightness that a woman puts on when she is dodging a moral obligation. He.
Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips.
A bird’s wing, comrades,′ he said, ’is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg. The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.
The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim – for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives – is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
I myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting.
She sat against him, putting her arm round his.
Mr. Upward italicises “at the present time” because he realises that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist.
And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened -if, indeed, it did happen.
The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that “I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.” It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that “they” will never allow him to do this, that and the other.
The parents sat round watching, and in their crass faces – faces not harsh or evil, only blunted by ignorance and mean virtues – you could see a solemn approval, a solemn pleasure in the spectacle of sin rebuked.
The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise.
In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.
If one has once read Shakespeare with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him, because there are not many subjects of major importance that he does not discuss or at least mention somewhere or another, in his unsystematic but illuminating way.
Now then, Dorothy! No snivelling, please! It all comes right somehow if you trust in God. Matthew vi. 35. The Lord will provide.
In England, where the Press is more centralized and the public more easily deceived than elsewhere, only two versions of the Spanish war have had any publicity to speak of: the Right-wing version of Christian patriots versus Bolsheviks dripping with blood, and the Left-wing version of gentlemanly republicans quelling a military revolt. The central issue has been successfully covered up.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
The clerks are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad temper till they have eaten their lunch.
Freedom of speech and of the Press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about.