1984

by George Orwell

the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,

The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.

Only the Thought Police mattered.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.

Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.

Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war.

Ministry of Love, which maintained l...

Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for e...

He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism

April 4th, 1984.

it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones.

Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities,

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.

he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed—and

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.

in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him.

at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies.

Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken.

the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.

Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

He was already dead, he reflected.

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote: Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. 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.

His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today.

Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no de...

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war,

though slightly drunk he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable.

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

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

to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,

to repudiate morality while laying claim to it,

to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy;

The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed.

Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away.

It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.

Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.

finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.

in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed.

composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years.

people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again.

the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.