In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. . They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
The only good human being is a dead one.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism
An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
People sleep peacably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittenly conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
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