1984

by George Orwell

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. 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?

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

The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended.

She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’ should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught.

not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; people are such hypocrites.”

She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.

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.

From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared.

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

a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself.

continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later.

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.

They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they choose.

A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

But the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible.

and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.

The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.

From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.

They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.

For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.

In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

They are aware that a change of overlordship means simply that they will be doing the same work as before for new masters who treat them in the same manner as the old ones.

And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.

You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.”

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.

The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.

Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?

Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.

When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.

The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.

He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed.

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.

Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.

To die hating them, that was freedom.

The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.