1984

by George Orwell

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.

certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two. For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the

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.

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.

really existed! It was impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. 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.

roof leaked whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you could

him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, gray shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the

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

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

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

As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face

the raid itself, but he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down,

And 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.”

opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible

clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked,

But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.

leader. At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.

In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din. “There is

movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party. The announcement

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.

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

and no one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave.

past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote: I understand HOW: I do

But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

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.

and a few lawyers and priests and so forth who lived on them—were the lords of the earth. Everything

’em ’yenas. Of course ’e was referring to the Labour Party, you understand.” Winston had the feeling that they were

’E says, ‘Why can’t you look where you’re going?’ ’e says. I says, ‘Ju think you’ve

What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.

girl out of his mind altogether. Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone. Until he could be alone

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

in Winston dim memories of something seen long ago on a wall or a hoarding—a vast bottle composed of electric lights which seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Seen from the top the stuff

capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity.

and grouping itself round the Newspeak words crimestop, blackwhite, and doublethink, makes

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time came, the world they constructed would not be just

save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I