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.
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.