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solipsism.
pg 266
Collective solipsism,
pg 266
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said. “Exactly. By making him suffer.
pg 266
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.
We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card.
pg 267
There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.
pg 267
There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxicatio...
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pg 267
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
pg 267
It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph.
pg 268
Goldstein and his heresies will live forever.
pg 268
Party. The others are
“I have not betrayed Julia,” he said.
pg 273
“No,” he said, “no; that is perfectly true. You have not betrayed Julia.”
“Tell me,” he said, “how soon will they shoot me?” “It might be a long time,” said O’Brien. “You are a difficult case. But don’t give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.”
pg 274
He was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormous, glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O’Brien—not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things.
pg 275
It must be so: how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgments? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
pg 277
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
pg 277
TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE.
GOD IS POWER.
He accepted everything.
Only surrender, and everything else followed.
pg 278
“If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.”
pg 278
He had heard himself cry aloud: “Julia! Julia! Julia, my love! Julia!”
pg 280
To die hating them, that was freedom.
pg 281
what are your true feelings toward Big Brother?” “I hate him.” “You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him; you must love him.” He released Winston with a little push toward the guards. “Room 101,” he said.
pg 282
He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him.
pg 283
“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”
pg 283
“The worst thing in the world,” said O’Brien, “varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.”
pg 283
It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four meters away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.
pg 283
“Do you remember,” said O’Brien, “the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.”
pg 284
“You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to do?”
pg 284
pg 284
They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.”
pg 284
“I have pressed the first lever,” said O’Brien. “You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap onto your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.”
pg 285
There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats.
pg 286
“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”
pg 286
But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.
pg 287
“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is forever,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out.
pg 290
“I betrayed you,” she said baldly. “I betrayed you,” he said. She gave him another quick look of dislike. “Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself
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pg 292
“I betrayed you,” she said baldly. “I betrayed you,” he said. She gave him another quick look of dislike. “Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself
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pg 292
“Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me—
pg 293
He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.
pg 297
Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
pg 297 ~298
