I am not saying, of course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I am only saying that they are ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than other people it is the result and not the cause of their way of life.
There were two facts that were the keynote of all else. One was that the people – the civil population – had lost much of their interest in the war; the other was that the normal division of society into rich and poor, upper class and lower class, was reasserting itself.
Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have? Throughout.
Unfortunately it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is penetrable. Of course everyone knows that class-prejudice exists, but at the same time everyone claims that he, in some mysterious way, is exempt from it. Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern in everyone else but never in ourselves.
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.
I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters so long as you can score a neat debating point.
Power is power over human beings, above all over the mind. Power over matter, external reality as you would call it, is not important. We control matter because we control the mind, Reality is inside the skull.
In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolise the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.
It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart into you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm – they’ve all got to be paid for in hard cash.
Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or fountain pen.
There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.
Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute.
Each day they expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy – enough to plough thousands of acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses – in mere, useless walking.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.
He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he did not understand why.
Gambling, beer and football filled the horizons of their minds.
He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.
And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered.