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Title: 1984
Authors: George Orwell
Category:supplementals
Number of Highlights: 33
Date: 2025-12-06
Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
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.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Tags:freedom
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
âWho controls the past,â ran the Party slogan, âcontrols the future: who controls the present controls the past.â
Tags:favorite,perspective
Orthodoxy means not thinkingânot needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.â
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in oneâs mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Tags:favorite,misinformation
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. Thisâalthough the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower senseâis the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against oneâs own body.
You had to liveâdid live, from habit that became instinctâin the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.
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 sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. 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.
Tags:war
How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. 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.
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
Tags:truth
They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: 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. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
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. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty.
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.
Tags:social_construct
You had to liveâdid live, from habit that became instinctâin the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
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.
âDonât 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.
âI donât mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesnât matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving youâthat would be the real betrayal.â She thought it over. âThey canât do that,â she said finally. âItâs the one thing they canât do. They can make you say anythingâanythingâbut they canât make you believe it. They canât get inside you.â
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.
âWho controls the past,â ran the Party slogan, âcontrols the future: who controls the present controls the past.â
In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girlâs body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. 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.
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.
He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising.
The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generationâpeople who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.
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.