Perhaps “friend” was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades; but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others.
Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally.
It has been denied that any direct pressure was exerted by the Russian Government, but the point is not of great importance, for the Communist parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy, and it is not denied that the Communist Party was the chief.
What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don’t exist. Comping up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches up to the stratosphere.
For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness.
Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, ‘mass sadism’, the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grams to twenty.
A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good – for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.
Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.
Life goes on much the same. In the face of terrifying dangers and golden political opportunities, people just keep-on keeping-on in a sort of twilight sleep in which they’re conscious of nothing but the daily-round of work, family life, darts at the pub, exercising the dog, bringing home the supper, beer, etc, etc.
Their combined ages were two hundred and sixty-three years. None of them had ever been out of England, fought in a war, been in prison, ridden a horse, travelled in an aeroplane, got married, or given birth to a child. There seemed no reason why they should not continue in the same style until they died. Year in, year out, nothing ever happened in the Comstock family.
His bowels seemed to turn to water.
Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like “I wander through each charter’d street” than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.
So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.
Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments and vaporisations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future.
And when memory failed and written records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
It is all lies.
There is no law to say that the beds in a lodging-house must be comfortable. This would be quite an easy thing to enforce – much easier, for instance, than restrictions upon gambling. The lodging-house keepers should be compelled to provide adequate bedclothes and better mattresses, and above all to divide their dormitories into cubicles.
Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped. Nothing exists except in an endless present in which the Party is always right.
It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant–it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery–and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided.