1984

by George Orwell

clocks were striking thirteen.

the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,

The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,

INGSOC.

It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak—was startlingly different from any other object in sight.

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one.

(nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws),

To mark the paper was the decisive act.

April 4th, 1984.

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

of being a person that you could talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen.

the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen.

WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.

But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he knew!—that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

'Who controls the past,'

ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem—

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm.