Big Brother is watching.
Notable Excerpts
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.
And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
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.
If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones.
‘It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.’
…the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St Clement’s, ‘You owe me three farthings,’ say the bells of St Martin’s, ‘When will you pay me?’ say the bells of Old Bailey, ‘When I grow rich,’ say the bells of Shoreditch.
In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. 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.
Inequality was the price of civilisation.
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
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.
‘Sanity is not statistical,’
Power is not a means, it is an end.
Sanity was statistical.