1984

by George Orwell

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.

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

It was like a single equation with two unknowns.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? 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.

On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: I love you.

Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive!

She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection.

“They sye that time ’eals all things, They sye you can always forget; But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years They twist my ’eartstrings yet!”

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.

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. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it.

What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.

The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held onto the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort.

What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.”

They can’t get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”

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

“They sye that time ’eals all things, They sye you can always forget; But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years They twist my ’eartstrings yet!”

Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.