Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you except the idea.
At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him.
The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.
Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping for you.
He really didn’t want his job. He didn’t want to work again; all he wanted was to sink, sink, effortless, down into the mud.
Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wildflowers... the red buses, the blue policemen – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
All he wanted was to get home quickly, and then sit down and be quiet.
En otras palabras: defender la democracia incluye destruir todo pensamiento independiente.
Do you believe in God, Winston?” “No.” “Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?” “I don’t know. The spirit of Man.
I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies – unless one counts journalists.
Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop.
Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers.
The stuff that was coming out of his mouth consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
La guerra es paz, la libertad es esclavitud, la ignorancia es la fuerza.
And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history.
A rose smells the same to me now as it did when I was twenty. Ah, but do I smell the same to the rose?
If PLONGEURS thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.
What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure forever?
But this sense of guilt and inevitable failure was balanced by something else: that is, the instinct to survive. Even a creature that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no way justifiable still wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. I could not invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success, but I could accept my failure and make the best of it. I could resign myself to being what I was, and then endeavour to survive on those terms.