1984

by George Orwell

It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.

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

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

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?

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

It's funny that even someone who really believes in the cause could be in danger of going too far. He's clearly passionate about the erasure of history in literature without needing more convincing from BB. I agree with Winston; he won't be around for long.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.

But with the voice from the telescreen nagging at his ears he could not follow the train of thought further.

This feels relevant to how we use our screens nowadays. If desired, there could always be noise coming through to pull us away from connecting to our own thoughts.

What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?

He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation—people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'.

This feels similar to the awareness gen z has about the media. A generation that grew up with the internet, and most of who have no concept of life before it, are able to identify propaganda and pandering almost as a means of protection and self preservation; a need to distinguish their reality from a facet of life that influences it so heavily.

Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.

And when he told her that aeroplanes had been in existence before he was born and long before the Revolution, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting.

I mean what does it matter in the grand scheme of things? When you're in this deep it takes a lot more to tear somthing apart than obvious planting of disinformation.

Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished?

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.

The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.