Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [41]

You can trust a cop who’ll take a bribe, but what happens when you run into a law-and-order zealot who won’t? The regime in Oceania seems immune to the lure of wealth. Its interests lie elsewhere, in the exercise of power for its own sake, in its unrelenting war on memory, desire and language as a vehicle of thought. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 41

Note

The editor crystallizes the novel’s central horror precisely: a regime that cannot be bought, whose motive is nothing so manageable as greed but power for its own sake — compact and chilling in ‘unrelenting war on memory, desire and language as a vehicle of thought.’