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Winston Smith,
glass doors of Victory Mansions,
It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.
Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way.
INGSOC.
Ninth Three-Year Plan.
this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.
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.
He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it.
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.
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.
porpoise,
the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen.
And yet 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.
still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that
was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.
He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory.
How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not
even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could ...
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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.
The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
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.
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.
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.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled 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 and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget,
then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.
The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?
All history was a palimpsest, scraped 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.
it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct
Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs.
the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.
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 e...
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“friend” was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades; but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others.
“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 version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want
...more
Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”
“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
In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
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.
He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth.
