by George Orwell

Editors Foreword:
Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff’s attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell’s prescience of modern life—the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language—and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written.

Status:
Completed

Rating:
5 Stars

Quotes and Personal Highlights:

Big Brother is Watching You.

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.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Being in a minority, even in 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.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from 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. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. 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. Now you begin to understand me.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

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

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

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

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.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

In the face of pain there are no heroes.