In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. |
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. |
The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. |
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. |
Loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature... The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. |
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. |
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. |
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. |
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity to pure wind. |
Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. |
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. |
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. |
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. 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. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ... |
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. |
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. |
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. |
The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. |
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. |
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. |
Freedom is Slavery |
