Invidia e un lucru oribil. Se deosebeste de toate celelalte suferinte pentru ca nu poate fi deghizata, nu poate fi inaltata pana la tragedie. E mai mult decat simpla durere, e dezgustatoare.
We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.
All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.
One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend – the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist.
Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.
These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.
And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.
It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.
For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.
Though it is unreal it is not meaningless.
The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.
There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoid- able order of things.
He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, than a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:.
Most people want to be good, but not that good and not all the time.
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.