A smart hotel is a place where 100 people toil like devils in order that 200 may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.
He might be ragged and cold or even starving, but so long as he could read, think and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his own mind.
Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.
Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.
You are rotting away, you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.
That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire. That was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.
It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply it’s bareness, it’s dinginess, it’s listlessness.
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.
The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.