Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that? I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written record and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.
It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people.
He said that the education of the young was more important than anything that could be done for those who are already grown up.
The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.
He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face toward the flames.
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever. “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.
And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston’s, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
The mob is in fact loose now, and–in the shape of rich men–is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‘smart’ hotels.
I suppose we may as well say goodbye.
Women who do not marry wither up – they wither up like aspidistras in back-parlour windows; and the devilish thing is that they don’t even know they’re withering.
People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain.
The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.
Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four.
He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.
Franco was not strictly comparable with Hitler or Mussolini. His rising was a military mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the Church, and in the main, especially at the beginning, it was an attempt not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism. This meant that Franco had against him not only the working class but also various sections of the liberal bourgeoisie – the very people who are the supporters of Fascism when it appears in a more modern form. More.
Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.
As a magistrate his methods were simple. Even for the vastest bribe he would never sell the decision of a case, because he knew that a magistrate who gives wrong judgments is caught sooner or later. His practice, a much safer one, was to take bribes from both sides and then decide the case on strictly legal grounds. This won him a useful reputation for impartiality.
There is nothing more dreadful in the world than to live in somebody else’s house, eating his bread and doing nothing in return for it.