1984

Quotes

1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2496-99  | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2016, 05:07 PM

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2500-2502  | Added on Saturday, October 01, 2016, 05:08 PM

What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2671-74  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 03:47 AM

Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2842-46  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 03:59 AM

Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2854-57  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 04:01 AM

The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2865-68  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 04:02 AM

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2871-76  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 04:03 AM

In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2879-81  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 04:04 AM

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2884-92  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 10:35 AM

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2900-2902  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 10:37 AM

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2902-5  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 10:37 AM

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2905-8  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 10:37 AM

Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2910-12  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 10:38 AM

It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2915-17  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 10:38 AM

The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2918-21  | Added on Sunday, October 02, 2016, 10:39 AM

War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 2999-3004  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:16 AM

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3016-18  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:17 AM

Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3024-27  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:18 AM

War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3029-33  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:19 AM

The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This—although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense—is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3094-98  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:22 AM

principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3114-17  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:24 AM

What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3121-24  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:25 AM

Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3124-26  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:25 AM

Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3131-32  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:26 AM

The so-called “abolition of private property” which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3139-43  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:27 AM

But the problems of perpetuating a hierarchical society go deeper than this. There are only four ways in which a ruling group can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3199-3202  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:30 AM

Nothing that he does is indifferent. His friendships, his relaxations, his behaviour towards his wife and children, the expression of his face when he is alone, the words he mutters in sleep, even the characteristic movements of his body, are all jealously scrutinized. Not only any actual misdemeanour, but any eccentricity, however small, any change of habits, any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3202-5  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:32 AM

On the other hand his actions are not regulated by law or by any clearly formulated code of behaviour. In Oceania there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3216-20  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:33 AM

The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3223-28  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:33 AM

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3240-43  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:35 AM

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3243-45  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:35 AM

It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3248-54  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:36 AM

To make sure that all written records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to forget that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, “reality control”. In Newspeak it is called doublethink, though doublethink comprises much else as well.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3255-56  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:36 AM

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3256-58  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:36 AM

The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3261-63  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:37 AM

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3267-68  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:37 AM

Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able—and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years—to arrest the course of history.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3311-12  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:38 AM

He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he did not understand why.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3358-59  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:41 AM

If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message. The future belonged to the proles.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3361-64  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:41 AM

Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3390-95  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:42 AM

“The house is surrounded,” said Winston. “The house is surrounded,” said the voice. He heard Julia snap her teeth together. “I suppose we may as well say good-bye,” she said. “You may as well say good-bye,” said the voice. And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; “And by the way, while we are on the subject, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head’!”
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3396-98  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:43 AM

Something crashed on to the bed behind Winston’s back. The head of a ladder had been thrust through the window and had burst in the frame. Someone was climbing through the window. There was a stampede of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black uniforms, with iron-shod boots on their feet and truncheons in their hands.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 3423-28  | Added on Monday, October 03, 2016, 03:44 AM

Mr Charrington was still wearing his old velvet jacket, but his hair, which had been almost white, had turned black. Also he was not wearing his spectacles. He gave Winston a single sharp glance, as though verifying his identity, and then paid no more attention to him. He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had straightened, and seemed to have grown bigger. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were less bushy, the wrinkles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Winston that for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 4279-86  | Added on Thursday, October 06, 2016, 07:57 PM

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. “If I wished,” O’Brien had said, “I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.” Winston worked it out. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.” Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: “It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.” He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a “real” world where “real” things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 4511-18  | Added on Thursday, October 06, 2016, 08:11 PM

They did not speak again. She did not actually try to shake him off, but walked at just such a speed as to prevent his keeping abreast of her. He had made up his mind that he would accompany her as far as the Tube station, but suddenly this process of trailing along in the cold seemed pointless and unbearable. He was overwhelmed by a desire not so much to get away from Julia as to get back to the Chestnut Tree Cafe, which had never seemed so attractive as at this moment. He had a nostalgic vision of his corner table, with the newspaper and the chessboard and the ever-flowing gin. Above all, it would be warm in there. The next moment, not altogether by accident, he allowed himself to become separated from her by a small knot of people. He made a half-hearted attempt to catch up, then slowed down, turned, and made off in the opposite direction. When he had gone fifty metres he looked back. The street was not crowded, but already he could not distinguish her. Any one of a dozen hurrying figures might have been hers.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 4527-33  | Added on Thursday, October 06, 2016, 08:12 PM

But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection. It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning. When he woke, seldom before eleven hundred, with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seemed to be broken, it would have been impossible even to rise from the horizontal if it had not been for the bottle and teacup placed beside the bed overnight. Through the midday hours he sat with glazed face, the bottle handy, listening to the telescreen. From fifteen to closing-time he was a fixture in the Chestnut Tree. No one cared what he did any longer, no whistle woke him, no telescreen admonished him. Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or what was called work.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 4538-41  | Added on Thursday, October 06, 2016, 08:13 PM

But there were other days when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never finished—when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels—threats, even, to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.
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1984 (George Orwell)
- Highlight Loc. 4750-56  | Added on Thursday, October 06, 2016, 08:22 PM

In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called recdep, the Fiction Department was called ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department was called teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations.