1984

It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all.

To mark the paper was the decisive act.

Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox.

It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impos- sible to avoid joining in.

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.

Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room.

It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster.

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.

With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it...

A single flicker of the eyes could give you away.

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed 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.

There were the vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth.

Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue— a quite bright blue.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.’

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

Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal.

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.

The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself— anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide.

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

Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.

The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.

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

As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.’

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

They were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two.

It was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

The long, noisy evening at the Centre, the boring, exhausting games, the lectures, the creaking camaraderie oiled by gin, had seemed intolerable.

He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right.

He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism.

‘When you were a young man we were all living in the tree-tops,’ said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.

‘I’ll twist your bloody ‘ead off if you get fresh with me.’

They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.

There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass.

It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.

It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten.

Suddenly his heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.

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

In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone.

At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.

It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.

Winston had a hallucination of himself smashing a pick-axe right into the middle of it.

For a moment it felt as though his entrails were being ground to pulp between the two muscular hips, then he had broken through, sweating a little.

With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him.

‘I hated the sight of you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards.’

It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay.

And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.

‘We are the dead,’ he said. ‘We’re not dead yet,’ said Julia prosaically.

Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.

It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves.

It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously.

In this room I’m going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.

It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after ‘the bells of Old Bailey’.

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

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

There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of strik-ing.

The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep people frightened’.

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.

He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.

He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it.

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.

‘The proles are human beings,’ he said aloud. ‘We are not human.’

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’

After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous.

‘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 understand that you will be fighting in the dark. You will always be in the dark.

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.

His body seemed to have not only the weakness of a jelly, but its translucency.

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.

It was now impossible for any human being to prove by documentary evidence that the war with Eurasia had ever happened.

Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments.

In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient— a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete— was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person.

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.

Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph.

The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power.

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies.

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.

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

From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

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

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.

Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as a focusing point for love, fear, and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organization.

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.

CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity.

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies— all this is indispensably necessary.

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

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

The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose.

‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them. They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice.

The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rose-bud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!

‘Smith!’ yelled a voice from the telescreen. ‘6079 Smith W.! Hands out of pockets in the cells!’

He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic.

A young officer, a trim black-uniformed figure who seemed to glitter all over with polished leather, and whose pale, straight-featured face was like a wax mask, stepped smartly through the doorway.

‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. ‘She listened at the keyhole.’

It was like a skull. Because of its thinness the mouth and eyes looked disproportionately large, and the eyes seemed filled with a murderous, unappeasable hatred of somebody or something.

You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I’ll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!

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.

There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks.

He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him.

He had the air of a doctor, a teacher, even a priest, anxious to explain and persuade rather than to punish.

‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’

You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.

He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain.

We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain.

But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out.

But there had been a moment— he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps— of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth.

‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.

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?

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— for ever.

A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him.

‘Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity.’

Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.

It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it.

Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

To die hating them, that was freedom.

‘You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.’

The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air.

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’

Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way.

It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning.

And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.

He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow.

Newspeak was designed not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Given, for instance, the word GOOD, there was no need for such a word as BAD, since the required meaning was equally well— indeed, better— expressed by UNGOOD.

The greatest difficulty facing the compil-ers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.

In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it WAS heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.

Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.

There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.

The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word CRIMETHINK.

It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

To mark the paper was the decisive act.

It was a gesture which, if anyone had still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox.

It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck.

Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it...

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.’

Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal.

Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.

It was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass.

It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.

In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone.

At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.

‘I hated the sight of you,’ he said. ‘I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards.’

The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.

Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly.

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.

After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous.

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in mid-sentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.

Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.

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.

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

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.

CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity.

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies— all this is indispensably necessary.

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

‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them. They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice.

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.

You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.

We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain.

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?

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— for ever.

‘You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.’

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’

He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow.

Newspeak was designed not to extend but to DIMINISH the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.