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There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.
You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
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.
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization.
“My Savior!” she extended her arms toward the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.
Political figures becoms god like to people
it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
he could not help sharing in the general delirium, but this subhuman chanting of “B-B! . . . B-B!” always filled him with horror. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same.
You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades; but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others.
We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger
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“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 concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.
reality-control.
How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished?
The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.”
Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.
Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life.
If there is hope [wrote Winston] it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
As the Party slogan put it: “Proles and animals are free.”
the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
I sold you and you sold me:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?
