But the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.
After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken well and spread my tidings Of the golden future time.
Spaniards seem not to recognize such a thing as a light diet.
Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not want to claim that I was a martyr or that Crossgates was a sort of Dotheboys Hall. But I should be falsifying my own memories if I did not record that they are largely memories of disgust.
Nothing in the world is quite so irritating as dealing with mutinous children.
A man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.
If they went hungry, it was not from feeding tyrannical human beings; if they worked hard, at least they worked for themselves. No creature among them went upon two legs. No creature called any other creature ‘Master’. All animals were equal. One.
The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies... Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
It says, ‘No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,’’ she announced finally.
Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.
I am twelve years old and have had over four hundred children. Such is the natural life of a pig. But no animal escapes the cruel knife i.
But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.
His eye fell upon the aspidistra. Two years he had inhabited this vile room; two mortal years in which nothing had been accomplished.
As for queueing-up, during the past five or ten years it has become what the psychologists call a conditioned reflex. If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue almost instinctively.
How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn’t the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English – or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.
Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be.
I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals. It would help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!