Summary:^1 These are some of my selected quotes.

  • The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.

  • This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death

  • It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party

  • He hated her because she was young and pretty and...because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so

  • 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:

  • Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

  • Beyond the late ’fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.

  • But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

  • 'Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.'

  • About a quarter of one’s salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions

  • Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.

  • Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

  • The only recognised purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.

  • I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

  • It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body.

  • For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.

  • The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations.

  • What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it.

  • He tried to make her understand...

  • And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present

  • 'You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards'

  • Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing.

  • In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. 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

  • They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

  • The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward.

  • Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

  • It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth , in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste.

  • In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

  • Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.

  • War, it will be seen, not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way.

  • ...technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.

  • The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.

  • Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life—the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like. Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.

  • In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

  • 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.

  • 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. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.

  • The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.

  • ...assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organisations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. 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.

  • If he is a person naturally orthodox (in Newspeak a goodthinker), he will in all circumstances...

  • The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate

  • Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop , in short, means protective stupidity.

  • *the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries

  • Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

  • For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

  • In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane.

  • If human equality is to be for ever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

  • Here we reach the central secret...But deeper than this lies the original motive, the never-questioned instinct...

  • He understood how; he did not understand why. Chapter I, like Chapter III, had not actually told him anything that he did not know

  • He fell asleep murmuring ‘Sanity is not statistical,’ with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.

  • ...hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies

  • ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them.

  • To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late—no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall.

  • You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’

  • ‘I don’t know—I don’t care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.’

  • The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull.

  • Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that he had betrayed Julia

  • He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.

  • Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced.

  • bang! would go the bullet, too late, or too early. They would have blown his brain to pieces before they could reclaim it. The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever.

  • The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death and his resurrection.

  • Occasionally, perhaps twice a week, he went to a dusty, forgotten-looking office in the Ministry of Truth and did a little work, or what was called work.

  • 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.

Comments: I read 1984 many years ago, well before I was unplugged. This was the first re-read since that time, by now well after unplugging. It was really cool to experience the book without an intermediate stage. Every sentence, phrase, and word holds so much significance.

Interestingly, I experienced a persistant reluctance to review this book and write these down in my journal (and not because of the time involved). There was strange aversion to working myself up to willingly face hard truths like this, and reflect on their personal relevance.

Footnotes:
^1 Mods, if this post falls under 'Rule 6: No examples from fiction' and "thus cannot be learned from," well that's dumb as shit but nuke it I guess.