The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality.
The modern emphasis on what is called ‘clean fun’ is really the symptom of a general unwillingness to touch upon any serious or controversial subject.
It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.
Do it to Julia.
Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not.
To mark the paper was the decisive act.
The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.
To dislike a writer’s politics is one thing. To dislike him because he forces you to think is another, not necessarily incompatible with the first.
Animals look from Napoleon to Pilkington, from man to pig back to man, they find that they are unable to tell the difference.
To think, to think, even with a split second left – to think was the only hope.
Bisa dikatakan semakin mahal makanan, semakin banyak keringat dan ludah yang harus dimakan.
Whenever A is oppressing B, it is clear to people of good will that B ought to be independent, but then it always turns out that there is another group C, which is anxious to be independent of B. The question is how large must a minority be before it deserves autonomy.
You wanted a good time; “they,” meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.
Since that time, war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.
Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere.
Quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted.
The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.