Nineteen Eighty-Four

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)

• "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 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 ecstacy 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)

• "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 for ever." (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)

• "doubleplusungood" (I.4)

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

• "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:

• "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)

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:

• "...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)

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

• "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 birds sang, the proles sang. The Party did not sing." (II.9)

• "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 practised 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)

Part Three

• "'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." (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 —for ever." (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)

• "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-existant." (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)

• "'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." (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)

• "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." (Appendix)

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