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!
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.