From Wikiquote
Nineteen
Eighty-Four 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. In some editions it is retitled 1984.
Part One
Spoiler warning: Plot, ending, or solution details
follow.
Chapter 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 pretence was always
unnecessary.
- It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen.
- 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.
- 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 pretence 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.
- 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
- 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.
Chapter 2
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your
skull.
- 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!
- Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside
your skull.
Chapter 3
- Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient
time.
- If all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into
history and became truth.
- He who controls the past controls the future. He who
controls the present controls the past.
Chapter 4
Chapter 7
If there is hope... it lies in the proles.
- If there is hope... it lies in the proles.
- Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If
that is granted, all else follows.
- He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he
himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a
minority of one.
Part Two
Chapter 5
- The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired
by the Government of Oceania itself, "just to keep people
frightened."
- "You're only a rebel from the waist downwards," he told
her.
Chapter
7
- "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't 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."
Chapter 9
All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the
world upon their followers.
- 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.
- There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung
to the truth even against the whole world, you were not
mad.
- 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.
- All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false
view of the world upon their followers.
- 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.
- Sanity is not statistical.
- The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of
Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the
Ministry of Plenty with starvation.
Part
Three
Chapter
2
- 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.
- "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."
- 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.
- The command of the old despotisms was Thou shalt
not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou
shalt. Our command is Thou art.
- 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.
Chapter
3
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Chapter
4
- To die hating them, that was freedom.
Chapter
5
- "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."
Chapter 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.
- "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.
- Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
- But it was all right, everything was all right, the
struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He
loved Big Brother.
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.
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.
Top topics
Wikis
Quiz
Facts
Map
Misc
Search
