1984

„even a back can be revealing.”

„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”

„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 physically survive?”

„To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!”

„The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”

„the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.”

„All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

„Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.”

„A word contains its opposite in itself.”

„Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

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

„a cigarette end must not be wasted.”

„Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.”

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

„the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern.”

„the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.”

„The past not only changed, but changed continuously.”

„The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious.”

„I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.”

„At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; to-day, to believe that the past is inalterable.”

„If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?”

„Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre.”

„in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body.”

„even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”

„To look round was to show guilt.”

„Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.”

„That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.”

„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.”

„You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.”

„When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything.”

„I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.”

„So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”

„The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.”

„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.”

„It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.”

„I don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there—small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.”

„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.”

„The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions.”

„If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

„The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper.”

„What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.”

„If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”

„They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to.”

„It occurred to Winston that a synthetic face was perhaps incapable of changing its expression.”

„You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea.”

„You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die. Those are the only results that you will ever see. There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.”

„in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at...”

„As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago.”

„From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.”

„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.”

„In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage.”

„the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes.”

„when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.”

„though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.”

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

„The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labour, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years.”

„The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable.”

„What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious.”

„It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.”

„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.”

„The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors.”

„All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft.”

„If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.”

„Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.”

„...if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

„Sanity is not statistical.”

„Where there is equality there can be sanity.”

„It was 'all right' in the camps, he gathered, so long as you had good contacts and knew the ropes.”

„It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.”

„In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.”

„The confession was a formality, though the torture was real.”

„in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.”

„Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

„The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.”

„What happens to you here is for ever.”

„What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

„no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

„The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.”

„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.”

„Only surrender, and everything else followed.”

„if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.”

„Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”

„A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that free had once meant 'intellectually free', than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook.”