Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.

As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overriped turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of the was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

„Până nu devin comștienți, nu se vor răzvrăti și până nu se răzvrătesc, nu pot deveni conștienți” - 1984

There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me--