discomfort

"We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
--Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

the only truth that matters

"Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing."
--The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch

married bliss?

"Marriage is a curious institution ... I cannot quite see how it can be possible. People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together. Those outside the cage can, to their own taste, satisfy their need for society by more or less organized dashes in the direction of other human beings. But the unit of two can scarcely communicate with others, and is fortunate, as the years go by, if it can communicate within itself."
--The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch

flagrant violations of reality

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. By lack of understanding they remained sane. 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."
--1984, George Orwell

then and now

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population ... could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated ... the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet -- !"
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"To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them 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."
--1984, George Orwell