1984

• Author:: [[George Orwell]]
• Full Title:: 1984
• Category:: [[books]]
• 

• Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

  • Hate Week. (Location 102)
  • The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. (Location 107)
  • You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised. (Location 122)
  • WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. (Location 135)
  • Two Minutes Hate. (Location 210)
  • Thoughtcrime, (Location 337)
  • 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: (Location 459)
  • The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. (Location 547)
  • His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. 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, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink. (Location 558)
  • doubleplusun- good (Location 605)
  • sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. (Location 675)
  • In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. (Location 799)
  • And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered? (Location 1053)
  • Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. (Location 1056)
  • It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. (Location 1097)
  • ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity. (Location 1212)
  • in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body. (Location 1504)
  • For the messages that it was occasionally necessary to send, there were printed postcards with long lists of phrases, and you struck out the ones that were inapplicable. (Location 1601)
  • Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. (Location 1828)
  • If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones. (Location 1865)
  • The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. (Location 2146)
  • the principal, underlying cause was that, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialised in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. (Location 2911)
  • Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted. (Location 2915)
  • by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. (Location 2921)
  • in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations—not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive. (Location 2923)
  • The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. (Location 2935)
  • but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. (Location 3006)
  • They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. (Location 3008)
  • 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. (Location 3027)
  • The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. (Location 3093)