1984

by George Orwell

purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government.

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

The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.

Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class.

The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.

She had a bold, aquiline face, a face that one might have called noble until one discovered that there was as nearly as possible nothing behind it. Very early in her married life he had decided—though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people—that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.

a real love affair was an almost unthinkable event. The women of the Party were all alike.

It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations.

being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.

every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

Just once in his life he had possessed—after the event: that was what counted—concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds.

No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

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

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution.

the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another.

utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you,

Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets—anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.

For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?

you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.

The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.

She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated.

the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.

the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.

He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions.

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.

'this is what we have got to do, unflinchingly. But this is not what we shall be doing when life is worth living again.'

In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power.

whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

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.

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world.

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.

when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without pro...

In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life;

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat.

Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible.

when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture.

But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.

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. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.

The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels.