But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire.
The trade union members who formed themselves into militias and chased the Fascists back to Saragossa in the first few weeks of war had done so largely because they believed themselves to be fighting for working-class control; but it was becoming more and more obvious that working-class control was a lost cause, and the common people, especially the town proletariat, who have to fill the ranks in any war, civil or foreign, could not be blamed for a certain apathy.
The shells the Fascists were firing at this period were wretchedly bad. Although they were 150 mm they only made a crater about six feet wide by four deep, and at least one in four failed to explode. There were the usual romantic tales of sabotage in the Fascist factories and unexploded shells in which, instead of the charge, there was found a scrap of paper saying ‘Red Front’, but I never saw one.
The freedom of the Press in Britain was always something of a fake, because in the last resort, money controls opinion;.
La guerra la lleva a cabo cada grupo gobernante contra sus propios gobernados, y el objetivo de la guerra no es hacer o impedir conquistas territoriales, sino conservar intacta la estructura de la sociedad.
We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. we do not destroy the heretic because he resist us: so long as he resist us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.
When are we going to attack? Why don’t we attack?’ were the questions you heard night and day from Spaniard and Englishman alike. When you think what fighting means it is queer that soldiers want to fight, and yet undoubtedly they do. In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week’s leave.
But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.
He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever?
It had long been realised that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.
Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.
More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins.
It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist.
The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership.
There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double- think- Greetings!
A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor – it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.
Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message. The future belonged to the proles.
Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.
In a world where everything could be done by machinery, everything would be done by machinery.