If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad.
Indeed, when one sees how tramps let themselves be bullied by the workhouse officials, it is obvious that they are the most docile, broken-spirited creatures imaginable.
Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vice.
So often like this, in lonely places in the forest, he would come upon something – bird, flower, tree – beautiful beyond all words, if there had been a soul with whom to share it. Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.
The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense, it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.
I can see the war that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.
I said that we should be all right if we had some cigarettes. I only meant this as a joke; nevertheless half an hour later McNair appeared with two packets of Lucky Strike. He had braved the pitch-dark streets, roamed by Anarchist patrols who had twice stopped him at the pistol’s point and examined his papers. I shall not forget this small act of heroism. We were very glad of the cigarettes.
For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?
Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if any of them could read, and they seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain – which political party they belonged to. They thought they were Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists.
You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.
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.