In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.
When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.
By itself,” he said, “pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable – something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed.
The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians.
Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center.
At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.
If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.
Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.
It was bliss, it was eternity.
It returned to-night, for just a little while-just as long as it takes to smoke two cigarettes. With smoke tickling his lungs, he abstracted himself from the mean and actual world. He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you except the idea.
At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him.
The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.
Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.
Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping for you.
He really didn’t want his job. He didn’t want to work again; all he wanted was to sink, sink, effortless, down into the mud.
Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wildflowers... the red buses, the blue policemen – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
All he wanted was to get home quickly, and then sit down and be quiet.
En otras palabras: defender la democracia incluye destruir todo pensamiento independiente.
Do you believe in God, Winston?” “No.” “Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?” “I don’t know. The spirit of Man.