Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) is a dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell, published in 1949. The story, which focuses on the life of Winston Smith, was Orwell's vision of a totalitarian state which has absolute control over every action and thought of its people through propaganda, secrecy, constant surveillance, and harsh punishment.

Contents 1 Part One 2 Part Two 3 Part Three 4 Appendix 5 External links

[edit] Part One

• It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (I.1)

• BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU (I.1)

• DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER (I.1)

• He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. (I.3)

• There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. (I.1)

• WAR IS PEACE
  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH (I.1)

• 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. (I.1)

• 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. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. (I.1)

• The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine-gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backward in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-mustachio'd, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:
  WAR IS PEACE
  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had on everyone's eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like 'My Saviour!' she extended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a prayer.

At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmic chant of 'B-B! .... B-B! .... B-B!'—over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first 'B' and the second—a heavy mumurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of one which seemed to hear the stamps of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. (I.1)

• Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. (I.1)

• 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! (I.2)

• Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. (I.2)

• Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time. (I.3)

• If all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. (I.3)

• doubleplusungood (I.4)

• We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness. (I.6)

• Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they can not become conscious. (I.7)
  • Paraphrase of Karl Marx: "Philosophy can only be realized by the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy." (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the Right)

• If there is hope... it lies in the proles. (I.7)

• In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. (I.7)

• Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. (I.7)

• The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote:

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.   (I.7)

• He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. (I.7)

• Life is moment-to-moment struggle against hunger, or cold, or sleeplessness-against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. (I.7)

• It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body. (1.8)

[edit] Part Two

• There was another, wilder possibility that kept raising its head, though he tried vainly to suppress it. This was, that the message did not come from the Thought Police at all, but from some kind of underground organization. Perhaps the Brotherhood existed after all! Perhaps the girl was part of it! No doubt the idea was absurd, but it had sprung into his mind in the very instant of feeling the scrap of paper in his hand. It was not till a couple of minutes later that the other, more probable explanation had occurred to him. And even now, though his intellect told him that the message probably meant death— still, that was not what he believed, and the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice from trembling as he murmured his figures into the speakwrite.
  He rolled up the completed bundle of work and slid it into the pneumatic tube. Eight minutes had gone by. He re-adjusted his spectacles on his nose, sighed, and drew the next batch of work towards him, with the scrap of paper on top of it. He flattened it out. On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting:

I LOVE YOU.   (II. 1)

• At the sight of words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid. (II.1)

• She did not understand that there was no such things as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.
  "We are the dead," he said.
  "We are not the dead yet," said Julia prosaically.
  "Not physically. Six months, a year—five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing."
  "Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?"(II.3)

• The Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up. (II.5)

• Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the party, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous Brotherhood was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one's way into it. He told her of the strange intimacy that existed, or seemed to exist, between himself and O'Brien, and of the impulse he sometimes felt, simply to walk into O'Brien's presence, announce that he was the enemy of the Party and demand his help. (II.5)

• The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened.' (II.5)

• "You're only a rebel from the waist downwards," he told her.

  She thought this was brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight. (II.5)

• The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you the mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your action were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seen all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles it suddenly occurred to him had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. for the first time in life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. and in think this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few week ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.
  "The proles are human beings," he said aloud. "We are not human." (II.7)

• He thought for a little while. "Has it ever occurred to you," hes said, "that the best thing for us to do would be simply to walk out of here before it's too late, and never see each other again?"
  "Yes, dear, it has occurred to me, several times. but I'm not going to do it, all the same."
  "We've been lucky," he said, "but it can't last much longer. You're young. You look normal and innocent. If you keep clear of people like me, you might stay alive for another fifty years."
  "No. I've thought it all out. What you do, I'm going to do. And don't be too downhearted. I'm rather good at staying alive."
  "We may be together for another six months—a year—there's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing, that either of us can do for the other. If I confess, they'll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess they'll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying will put off your death for as much as five minutes. Neither of us will ever know whether the other is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of any kind. The other thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even that can't make the slightest difference."
  "If you mean confessing," she said, " we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you."
  "I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. 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."
  She thought it over. "They can't do that," she said finally. "It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you believe it. They can't get inside you."
  "No," he said a little more hopefully, "no; that's quite true. They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them." (II.7)

• He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy on you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. Perhaps that was the less true when you were actually in their hands. One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: torture, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning. Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner hear, whose working were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable. (II.7)

• "Then there is such a person as Goldstein?" he said.
  "Yes, there is such a person, and he is alive. Where I do not know."
  "And the conspiracy—the organisation? It is real? It is not simply an invention of the Thought Police?"
  "No, it is real. The Brotherhood, we call it. You will never learn much more about the Brotherhood than that it exists and that you belong to it. I will come back to that presently." He looked at his wristwatch. "it is unwise even for members of the Inner Party to turn off the telescreen for more than half an hour. You ought not to have come here together, and you will have to leave separately. You, Comrade"—he bowed his head to Julia—"will leave first. We have about twenty minutes at our disposal. You will understand that I must start by asking you certain questions. In general terms, what are you prepared to do?"
  "Anything that we are capable of," said Winston.
  O'Brien had turned himself a little in his chair so that he was facing Winston. He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her. For a moment the lids flitted down over his eyes. He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already.
  "You are prepared to give your lives?"
  "Yes."
  "You are prepared to commit murder?"
  "Yes."
  "To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundred of innocent people?"
  "Yes."
  "To betray your country to foreign powers?"
  "Yes."
  "You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to dissemingate veneral diseases—to do anything which is likely to cause demoralisation and weaken the power of the Party?"
  "Yes."
  "If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face—are you prepared to do that?"
  "Yes."
  "You are prepared to lose your identity and live out the rest of your life as a waiter or deck-worker?"
  "Yes."
  "You are prepared to commit suicide, if and when we order you to do so?"
  "Yes."
  "You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?"
  "No!" broke in Julia.
  It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again. Until he had said it, he did not know what he was going to say. "No," he said finally.
  "You did well to tell me," said O'Brien. "it is necessary for us to know everything."
  He turned himself toward Julia and added in a voice with somewhat more expression it it:
  "Do you understand that even if he survives, it may be as a different person? We may be obliged to give him a new identity. His face, his movements, the shape of his hands, the colour of his hair—even his voice would be different. And you yourself might have become a different person. Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb."
  Winston could not help snatching another sidelong glance at Martin's Mongolian face. There were no scars that he could see. Julia had turned a shade paler, so that her freckles were showing, but she face O'Brien boldly. She murmured something that seemed to be assent.
  "Good. Then that is settled." (II.8)

• "You understand," he said, "that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark. You will receive orders and you will obey them, without knowing why. Later I shall send you a book from which you will learn the true nature of the society we live in, and the strategy by which we shall destroy it. When you have read the book. you will be full members of the Brotherhood. But between the general amiss that we are fighting for, and the immediate tasks of the moment, you will never know anything. I tell you that the Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million. from your personal knowledge you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen. You will have three or four contacts, who will be renewed from time to time as they disappear. As this was your first contact, it will be preserved. When you receive orders, they will come from me. If we find it necessary to communicate with you, it will be through Martin. When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people. Probably you will not even betray me. By that time I may be dead, or I shall have become a different person, with a different face." (II.8)

• “You will have heard rumours of the existence of the Brotherhood. No doubt you have formed your own picture of it. You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea. You will get no comradeship and no encouragement. When finally you are caught, you will get no help. We never help our members. At most, when it is absolutely necessary that someone should be silenced, we are occasionally able to smuggle a razor blade into a prisoner's cell. 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. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.”
  He halted and looked for the third time at his wrist-watch.
  “It is almost time for you to leave, comrade,” he said to Julia. “Wait. The decanter is still half full.”
  He filled the glasses and raised his own glass by the stem.
  “What shall it be this time?” he said, still with the same faint suggestion of irony. “To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?”
  “To the past,” said Winston.
  “The past is more important,” agreed O'Brien gravely.
  They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go. O'Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It was important, he said, not to go out smelling of wine: the lift attendants were very observant. As soon as the door had shut behind her he appeared to forget her existence. He took another pace or two up and down, then stopped.
  “There are details to be settled,” he said. “I assume that you have a hiding-place of some kind?”
  Winston explained about the room over Mr. Charrington's shop.
  “That will do for the moment. Later we will arrange something else for you. It is important to change one's hiding-place frequently. Meanwhile I shall send you a copy of ‘’the book’’” — even O'Brien, Winston noticed, seemed to pronounce the words as though they were in italics — “Goldstein's book, you understand, as soon as possible. It may be some days before I can get hold of one. There are not many in existence, as you can imagine. The Thought Police hunt them down and destroy them almost as fast as we can produce them. It makes very little difference. The book is indestructible. If the last copy were gone, we could reproduce it almost word for word. Do you carry a brief-case to work with you?” he added.
  “As a rule, yes.”
  “What is it like?”
  “Black, very shabby. With two straps.”
  “Black, two straps, very shabby — good. One day in the fairly near future — I cannot give a date — one of the messages among your morning's work will contain a misprinted word, and you will have to ask for a repeat. On the following day you will go to work without your brief-case. At some time during the day, in the street, a man will touch you on the arm and say ‘I think you have dropped your brief-case.’ The one he gives you will contain a copy of Goldstein's book. You will return it within fourteen days.”
  They were silent for a moment.
  “There are a couple of minutes before you need go,” said O'Brien. “We shall meet again — if we do meet again—”
  Winston looked up at him. “In the place where there is no darkness?” he said hesitantly.
  O'Brien nodded without appearance of surprise. “In the place where there is no darkness,” he said, as though he had recognized the allusion. “And in the meantime, is there anything that you wish to say before you leave? Any message? Any question?”
  Winston thought. There did not seem to be any further question that he wanted to ask: still less did he feel any impulse to utter high-sounding generalities. Instead of anything directly connected with O'Brien or the Brotherhood, there came into his mind a sort of composite picture of the dark bedroom where his mother had spent her last days, and the little room over Mr. Charrington's shop, and the glass paperweight, and the steel engraving in its rosewood frame. Almost at random he said:
  “Did you ever happen to hear an old rhyme that begins ‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St Clement's?”
  Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza:
  '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.
  ‘You knew the last line!’ said Winston.
  “Yes, I knew the last line. And now, I am afraid, it is time for you to go. But wait. You had better let me give you one of these tablets.’
  As Winston stood up O'Brien held out a hand. His powerful grip crushed the bones of Winston's palm. At the door Winston looked back, but O'Brien seemed already to be in process of putting him out of mind. He was waiting with his hand on the switch that controlled the telescreen. Beyond him Winston could see the writing-table with its green-shaded lamp and the speakwrite and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. The incident was closed. Within thirty seconds, it occurred to him, O'Brien would be back at his interrupted and important work on behalf of the Party. (II.8)

• 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. (II.8)

• The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. (II.9)

• There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. (II.9)

• The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. (II.9)

• The birds sang, the proles sang. The Party did not sing. (II.10)

• We are the Dead. (II.8)

• In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible. (II.9)

• 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. (II.9)

• Sanity is not statistical. (II.9)

• I hated the sight of you. I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobble stone. (II.9)

[edit] Part Three

• "Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. 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." (III.1)

• "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." (III.1)

• You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to re-learn, Winston. It needs an act of self destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane. (III.2)

• 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.'
  'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.' (III.2)

• 'We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. [...] we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.' (III.2)

• 'The command of the old despotisms was Thou shalt not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou shalt. Our command is Thou art.' (III.2)

• 'Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.' (III.2)

• 'Does the Brotherhood exist?'
  'That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.' (III.2)

• The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that 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. (III.3)

• Power is not a means; it is an end. (III.3)

• Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. (III.3)

• He also felt that his mother’s love for him and his awareness of her death as a tragedy belonged to a bygone age when words like love and tragedy had some real meaning just as human individuals possessed some real dignity. (III.3)

• The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy— everything. (III.3)

• 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. (III.3)

• We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards 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. (III.3)

• 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 intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. (III.3)

• Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible— and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. (III.3)

• Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you. (III.3)

• "No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe-I don't know, some spirit, some principle-that you will never overcome."
  "Do you believe in God, Winston?"
  "No."
  "Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?"
  "I don't know. The spirit of man." (III. 3)

• If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent. (III.3)

• I have not betrayed Julia. (III.3)

• He had not stopped loving her; his feelings toward her had remained the same. (III.3)

• You are a difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you. (III.3)

• He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate. (III.4)

• To die hating them, that was freedom. (III.4)

• '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.' (III.5)

• Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table: 2+2=5 (III.6)

• '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 never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out. (III.6)

• Under the spreading chestnut tree
  I sold you and you sold me.
  There lie they, and here lie we
  Under the spreading chestnut tree. (III.6)

• But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. (III.6)

[edit] Appendix

• The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

• Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.'

[edit] External links

WARNING: Nineteen Eighty-Four will NOT enter the public domain in the United States of America until 2044 and in the European Union until 2020, although it is public domain in countries such as Canada, Russia, and Australia.

• Nineteen Eighty-Four at Project Gutenberg Australia
• 1984 at online-literature.com
• 1984 at Orwell.ru
• 1984 at george-orwell.org
• 1984 at netcharles.com