1984

by George Orwell

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.

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.

He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed—

in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less.

People are drawn to the truth, no matter how hard it is to hear or how much it is opposed. Good people will see through the lies fed to them, and will eventually question and seek out the truth.

Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother,

It’s ironic. It seems that the point of the Hate program is to help build strength towards the Big Brother, yet by showing such sound opposition one could feel “hate” towards the very thing that was supposed to be strengthened. By exposing themselves and their flaws in such a way they can cause people to harden their resolve towards the Party or against it. The need and want to speak one’s mind over-ridding the need to not think for oneself.

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

the worship of Big Brother—it was all a sort of glorious game to them.

Sounds like the kind of propaganda you’d get from most dictatorship/communism. What we fail to see if that it is also used in the world today… it frightens me

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,”

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.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.

Tragedy,

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.

no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

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.

“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

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?

The Mandela effect

But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence.

Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.

Interesting how even with a large AI system, like Big Brother, it still made errors due to human agency. Most of its predictions would have been core if humans were not an actual factor. Since people are so unpredictable. Even in this world where there is no free thought, people still can choose to do something different because of this human factory to change any errors.

“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 it.

A common theme in most dystopian books, get rid of language-destroy communication=no understanding, no growth, more wars. Even in the BOM in Ether we see how a lack of knowledge led to their own destruction. (Yes it was a lack of knowledge of God but it still applies)

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

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.

Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.

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

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.

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

Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event—years after it.”

“I’m quite ready to take risks, but only for something worth while, not for bits of old newspaper.

Interesting, the very thing that would be discarded could be the keystone that is taken out of the Party’s archway and make everything crumble around it. While people might know the news is a lie, they cannot be certain of that fact, simply because there is no evidence. But if there were, I wonder how quickly society would demand for truth?

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.

If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.”

but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead.

A way of bringing it back to the start of the book. Winston knew he was dead, that fact of life and death made it easy to start this journey and now to see it come closer to an end.

It’s interesting that the government would look upon these terrible acts as things to be rewarded by its own citizens and not the enemy. In a way they are promoting their outlook of war and wanting their citizens to be committing the atrocities and not merely receiving them…

technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

How would war stunt the growth of technology and other human advances? In many ways the people are busier and working productively, and yet a constant state of wars leaves little room for personal development.

Meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality

In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.

or some other result generally held to be undesirable,

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.

The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.

“Four.” “And if the Party says that it is not four but five—then how many?” “Four.”

A critical point- this is what society is trying to currently do to us… it may not be physically torture but it is physiological

“It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.” “Why not?” “It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”

“If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.”

“It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.”