“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
Tangential: this seem to be an extremely minor opinion of mine, but does messaging from O'Brien to Winston not boil down to:
- "for god's sake please play by the rules, get into the power, and only then and only by doing so join us the Miniluv equals IRA; do not try to walk through the front door and topple the building by hand"
- "I thought you were smart enough to understand the intricacy of this game, spared precious resources for you, and giving you multiple chances. Your undecided and uncultured reactions to my efforts are irritating"
Or am I absolutely hallucinating? Is O'Brien as a sad, captured, ex-revolutionist government torturer all there is to it?
Ye I get that but my main point is that it is not Orwell the real person that is quoted, but a fictional character that is a high level official in a dystopic police agency. If you haven't read the book it might be as Orwell the author is complicit.
But sry might be a nitpick and obvious from context.
Alternately, if there were two layers of quoting (here, adding a >) then the outer layer would more-clearly refer to the book, rather than the lines of the character.
It’d be a point against in a formal debate, but in casual conversation it’s safe to assume your audience passed junior high and is familiar with the work.
― George Orwell, 1984