1984
It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations.
George Orwell • 1984
The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And so far as the women were concerned, the Party’s efforts were largely successful.
George Orwell • 1984
This seems short sighted of Winston. He canot imagine a rich inner life for anyone but himself, but least of all women
“Don’t 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.
George Orwell • 1984
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
George Orwell • 1984
He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation.
George Orwell • 1984
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp.
George Orwell • 1984
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.
George Orwell • 1984
I never consciously connected 1984 with Foucault's panopticon before, which I blame on my having read this when I was about thirteen
output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting
George Orwell • 1984
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.