1984

by George Orwell

it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc.

As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true

sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the ...

“There is a word in Newspeak,” said Syme. “I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.” Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well

There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he

Syme looked up. “Here comes Parsons,” he said. Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, “that bloody fool.”

a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large,

appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal.

Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?

Always in your stomach and in your skin there was

a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.

Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or

within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

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.

The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.

She would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating, but submitting.

The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction, although she was his wife.

He had written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked. The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

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

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.

It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never have been any such law as the jus primae noctis, or any such creature as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed—after the event: that was what counted—concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification.

No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

The past not only changed, but changed continuously.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.

The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. 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.

It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it

in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. But this evening as he came out of the Ministry the balminess of the April air had tempted him. The sky was a warmer blue than he had seen it that year, and suddenly the long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable. On impulse he had turned away from the bus stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself along unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.

tired-looking vegetables.

He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism.

And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness,

but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob, utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.

A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him. All he wanted was to get home quickly and then sit down and be quiet.

moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body.

life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

have taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one’s feelings appear in one’s face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct,

There was no enquiry he could make. She might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania—worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.

So strong is our fear of abandonment that her having changed her mind is worse then her being vapourized

He sat down with a friendly smile. The silly blond face beamed into his. Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it.

Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?” He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst. “I hated the sight of you,” he said. “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police.”

it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

There was a direct, intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy.

One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish.

The process of life had ceased to be intolerable,

But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence.

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.