1984 Text Notes

1984 Text Notes

Genre – dystopian, fiction, futuristic fable, allegory (literary analogy, tries to teach), didactic, physiological

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” (p.3)

Themes
The Dangers of Totalitarianism
A political novel with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government.
Totalitarian governments, like in Spain and Russia, went to horrific lengths to maintain and increase their power.
Western nations were, at this time, still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism
In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. This was before the cold war.
Orwell was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions and was particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens.
Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realisation imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power.
If totalitarianism was not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel would eventuate.
A state is portrayed in which the government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” (p.6)
“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.” (p.6)
“I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.” (p.83)
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” (p.83)
“the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” (p.83)
“And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.” (p.84)
“If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?” (p.84)
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” (p.84)
“freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” (p.84)
“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.” (p.201)
“that the conditions of life in all three super states are very much the same” (p.205)
“Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable at all. Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the there super states not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so.” (p.205)
“they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn” (p.205)
“the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing” (p.205)
“Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what happened in the past.” (p.206)
“Efficiency, even military efficiency is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.” (p.206)
“Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all. Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down.” (p.207)
“once the minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they chose” (p.207)
“As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.” (p.214)
“Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self confidence and willingness to govern” (p.215)
“Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself”(p.215)
“assumed that what is not hereditary cannot be permanent. He did not see that eh continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been short-lived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchial 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. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood, but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure always remains the same.”(p.218)
“We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us he we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.” (p.267)
“You could grasp the mechanisms of the society you lived in, but not its underlying motives.” (p.274)
“He knew in advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That is sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.” (p.275)
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all 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.” (p.275)
“they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings could 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.” (p.276)
“the individual is only a cell… The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.” (p.276)
“The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual…. Slavery is freedom. Alone –free- the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body- but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter – external reality, as you would call it - is not important.” (p.277)
“Nothing exists except through human consciousness” (p.278)
“Outside man there is nothing” (p.278)
“This is not solipsism…. All this is a digression… The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is no power over things, but over men.” (p.279)
“By making him suffer… Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” (p.279)
“A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.” (p.279)
“Ours is founded upon hatred” (p.279)
“you are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love” (p.281)
“always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever” (p.280)
“And remember that it is forever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again.” (p.280)
“The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.” (p.281)
“can you not understand that death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal.” (p.282)
“You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” (p.282)
“White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolise the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.” (p.302)
“suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at the cock-crow” (p.308)

War
“In one combination or another, these three superstates are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference.” (p.193)
“war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries” (p.193)
“In the centres of civilisation war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption of goods… War has in fact changed its character.” (p.194)
“it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable.” (p.194)
“there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about” (p.194)
“In any case each of the three super-states is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries” (p.194)
“it is for the possession of these thickly populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling” (p.195)
“the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment” (p.195)
“but above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour” (p.195)
“are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely” (p.195)
“They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging war is always to be in a better position to wage another war”(p.196)
“to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society” (p.196)
“Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting output of goods.” (p.198)
“The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.” (p.198)
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour… otherwise used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.” (p.199)
“In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half of the necessities of life” (p.199)
“War… not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples” (p.200)
“But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of the masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself.” (p.200)
“necessary that the prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.” (p.200)
“All that is need is that a state of war should exist” (p.200)
“It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest” (p.200)
“All three powers merely continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later” (p.203)
“While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible” (p.206)
“The war… is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless” (p.207)
“The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of war is to… keep the structure of society intact.” (p.207)
“a peace that is truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.” (p.208)

Power Structure
“quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.” (p.45)
“but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat” (p.45)

“if there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.” (p.72)
“if there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even identifying one another.” (p.72)
“it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word.” (p.72)
“But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire.” (p.73)
“if they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning.” (p.73)
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” (p.74)
“The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage” (p.74)
“true to the principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules.” (p.74)
“It was not necessary to know much… To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them… eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings.” (p.74)
“a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations” (p.75)
“their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances” (p.75)
“They were beneath suspicion…‘Proles and animals are free’ ”(p.75)
“The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism.” (p.156)
“What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.” (p.172)

“If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” (p.198)
“To return to the past…. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanisation which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.” (p.198)
“It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another” (p.199)
“The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty.” (p.199)
“makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival” (p.200)
“either to exterminate the inhabitants, a task of great physical difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred million people, who, so far as technical development foes, are roughly on the Oceanic level. The problem is the same for all three super states. It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and coloured slaves.” (p.204)
“The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred and self righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate” (p.204)

“The aims of the these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High.” (p.210)
The Low – “abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again.” (p.210)
“sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either the belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude” (p.210)
“no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer” (p.210)
“In past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High” (p.211)
“had generally been softened by promises of compensations in an imaginary world beyond the grave. The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice and fraternity.” (p.211)
“In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown” (p.211)
“But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned.” (p.211)
The Party – “had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality” (p.211)
“human equality had become technically possible” (p.212)
“but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable, but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilisation.” (p.212)
“it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels.” (p.212)
“human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted” (p.212)
“The heirs of the French, English and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and had even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent. But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realisable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.” (p.213)
“if the Inner Party is described as the brain of the State, [the Outer Party] may be justly likened to the hands”(p.217)
“without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is” (p.219)
“They can be granted intellectual liberty, because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.” (p.219)

“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody… And the people under the sky were also very much the same”(p.229)
“held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!” (p.229)
“The future belonged to the proles” (p.229)
“Where there was equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal” (p.229)
“passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill” (p.229)
“The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing.” (p.230)
“The Party prisoners were always silent and terrified, but the ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody.” (p.238)

Psychological Manipulation
The Party bombards its subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought.
The telescreen is a constant stream of constant stream of propaganda designed to make the shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes.
The telescreens monitor behaviour and everywhere the citizens are reminded that the authorities are scrutinising them. Especially through the “Big Brother is watching you” signs.
The Party undermines the family structure by inducting children into an organisation called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes them and encourages them to spy on their parents and report on any instance of disloyalty to the Party.
Individuals are forced to suppress their sexual desires and treat it only as a means of procreating.
People’s pent-up frustration and emotion is turned into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the Party’s political enemies.

“If I confess, they’ll shoot you, and if I refuse to confess they’ll shoot you just the same. Nothing that I can do or say, or stop myself from saying, will put off your death for as much as five minutes.” (p.173)
“We shall be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn’t betray one another, although even that can’t make the slightest difference.” (p.173)
“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” (p.173)
“They can make you say anything – anything – but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.” (p.174)
“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.” (p.174)
“but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking.” (p.174)
“They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to…. the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.” (p.174)
“It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish” (p.190)
“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.” (p.214)
“It is a problem of continuously moulding the consciousness both of the directing group and of the larger executive group that lies immediately below it” (p.216)
“A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair.” (p.243)
“You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events, and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened… You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue.” (p.258)
“Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to be sane” (p.263)
“The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them” (p.265)
“It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.” (p.267)
“there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.” (p.269)
“when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed.” (p.271)
“ ‘You do not exist’, contain a logical absurdity?” (p.272)
“As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind” (p.272)
“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull…. There is nothing that we could not do… We make the laws of nature.” (p.277)
“Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.” (p.280)
“He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love” (p.289)
“By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought” (p.290)
“He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past had never been altered.” (p.290)
“Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it.” (p.290)
“If he thinks he floats of the floor, and I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.’ Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is a hallucination.’…. The fallacy was obvious… how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own mind? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.” (p.291)
“The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop” (p.291)
“It need also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.” (p.292)
“He obeyed the Party, but he still hated the Party. In the old days he had hidden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate. He knew that he was in the wrong, but he preferred to be in the wrong.” (p.293)
“For the first time he perceived that if you wanted to keep a secret you must also hid it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.” (p.294)
“And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.” (p.294)
“The heretical thought would be unpunished, unrepented, out of their reach for ever. They would have blown a hole in their own perfection. To die hating them, that was freedom.” (p.294)
“In these days he cold never fix his mind on any one subject for more than a few moments at a time” (p.301)
“But they could get inside you. ‘What happens to you here is for ever’ O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterised out.” (p.303)

Memory
“He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been like this” (p.5)
“Nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible” (p.5)
“not merely lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.” (p.9)

“was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.” (p.36)
“Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was need was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’” (p.37)
“nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in” (p.40)

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes they swallowed it.” (p.62)
“Was he then alone in the possession of a memory?” (p.62)
“Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different.” (p.62)
“Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?” (p.63)
“A sense of helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish head of details.” (p.95)
“But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another.” (p.96)
“but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.” (p.97)
“It was a memory that he must have deliberately pushed out of his consciousness over many years” (p.168)
“In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?” (p.260)
“It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!” (p.261)
“you have not controlled it… You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality… You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you.” (p.261)
“reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal, Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking though the eyes of the Party.” (p.261)
“It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.” (p.261)
“He pushed the picture out of his mind. It was a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally. They did not matter so long as one knew them for what they were. Some things happened, others had not happened.” (p.309)

Emotional Manipulation
“some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room… The Hate had started” (p.13)
“Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.” (p.15)
“the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred” (p.15)
“In a lucid moment Winston found the he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against he rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to take part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.” (p.16)
“A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness… seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” (p.16)
“the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp” (p.16)
“At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration” (p.17)
“He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so” (p.17)
“succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him” (p.17)
“an attack so exaggerated and perverse that t a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.” (p.14)
“but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were throwing extra work onto everybody” (p.145)
Preparations for Hate Week - “Winston was gelatinous with fatigue… His body seemed to have not only the weakness of jelly, but its translucency.”(p.186)
“after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on two thousand Eurasian war criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces” (p.187)
“It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened… the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by the wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren.” (p.188)

“Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.” (p.32)
“The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.” (p.36)

“What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.” (p.33)
“magnificent gesture by which a whole civilisation seemed to be annihilated” (p.131)

“he could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction.” (p.61)

“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.” (p.133)
“Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed.” (p.68)
“The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.” (p.137)
“Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.” (p.68)
“Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation” (p.69)
“Chastity was as deeply ingrained in them as Party loyalty.” (p.71)
“They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be. And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life.” (p.71)
“The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire for it was thoughtcrime.” (p.71)
“All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without women” (p.126)
“the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual Puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.” (p.139)
“When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time… If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get so excited about Big Brother and the Three Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?” (p.139)
“intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy” (p.140)
“For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it.” (p.145)
“She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.” (p.146)
“Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided… his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer had any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice.” (p.157)

“was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world” (p.172)

“A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm.” (p.220)
“He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her.” (p.240)
“What happens to you here is for ever… We shall crush you down to the point form which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and ten we shall fill you with ourselves.” (p.269)
“The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the organsm… There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness.” (p.280)

“the final, indispensible, healing change had never happened, until this moment” (p.311)
“He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul as white as snow.” (p.311)
“Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache…everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” (p.311)

Indoctrination
“so vicious was the boy’s demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.” (p.25)
“There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.” (p.25)
“But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless fright on the woman’s greyish face” (p.26)
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible” (p.26)
“they adored the Party and everything connected with it” (p.26)

“it was one of those dreams, which while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.” (p.32)

Family
“They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished… The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who know them intimately.” (p.140)

Physical Control
The Party also controls the bodies of its subjects
Even a tiny facial twitch can lead to arrest. A person’s own nervous system becomes his greatest enemy.
The Party keeps its members in a general state of exhaustion
Winston concludes that nothing is more powerful than physical pain – no emotional loyalty or moral conviction can overcome it. By conditioning the minds of the victims through physical torture the Party is able to control reality.
“uniform of the Party” (p.4)
“there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity” (p.17)
“The stuff was like nitric acid…. in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club.” (p.6) – Victory Gin
“This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws) but if detected tis was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least twenty five years in a forced labour camp.” (p.8)

“It was always the women…. who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” (p.10)
“peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him” (p.10)

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.” (p.30)

“The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the ‘fifties.” (p.31)
“It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.” (p.64)

“anything that suggested solitude… was slightly dangerous… ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.” (p.85)
“It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near to the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.” (p.148)

“but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body.” (p.106)
“On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe.” (p.106)
“In Oceania there is no law… the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments and vaporisations are not inflicted as punishments for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future.” (p.220)

“But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and the foreknowledge of pain.” (p.250)
“Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.” (p.251)
“The confession was a formality, though the torture was real” (p.252)
“In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards.” (p.254)
“His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly” (p.254)
“Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed” (p.255)
“he had the feeling that some mortal injury was being done to him… but his body was being wrenched out of shape, the joints were being slowly torn apart” (p.257)
“Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt.” (p.284)
“his body was grey all over with ancient, ingrained dirt” (p.284)
“Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?” (p.285)
“pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death.” (p.297)
“Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be disobeyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to.” (p.297)
“He had the feeling of sitting in utter loneliness” (p.298)
“They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless” (p.298) rats
“At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.” (p.305)

Surveillance
“contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.” (p.3)
“From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.” (p.156)
“while the eyes looked deep into Wiston’s own” (p.4)
“the telescreen… could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely” (p.4)
“there was no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment” (p.5)
“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 was scrutinised.” (p.5) “even a back can be revealing” (p.5)
“He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.” (p.6)
“To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression in his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.” (p.19) “He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen.” (p.7)
“The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.” (p.4)
“everywhere. Always the eyes watching yo0u and the voice enveloping you.” (p.29)
“no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” (p.29)
“precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all” (p.65)
“it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control” (p.65)
“The smallest thing could give you away” (p.65)
“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 offence… facecrime, it was called.” (p.65)
“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.” (p.67)
“That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.” (p.67)
“No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.” (p.79)
“but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up” (p.82)
“It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated. Whichever way you turned, the telescreen faced you” (p.115)
“Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing” (p.144)
“Dirty or clean the room was paradise.” (p.157)
“in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance” (p.214)
“A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police.” (p.219)
“any nervous mannerism that could possibly be the symptom of an inner struggle, is certain to be detected. He has no freedom of choice in any direction whatever.” (p.219)
“for the first time in his life he was looking, with knowledge, at a member of the Thought Police.” (p.234)

Control of Information, History and the Past
The Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends.
The Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their pasts. As a result memories become fuzzy and unreliable and citizens become willing to believe whatever the Party tells them.
By controlling the present the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.
Ministry of Truth – “an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete” (p.5)
“it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two” (p.9)
“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.” (p.9)
“Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten… vaporised was the usual word.” (p.21)
“The past was dead, the future was unimaginable” (p.28)
“How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?” (p.29)
“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that even, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?” (p.37)
“When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.” (p.34)
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ ”(p.37)
“The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed” (p.38)
“But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence.” (p.39)
“to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened” (p. 41)
“This process of continuous alteration was applied… to any kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.” (p.42)
“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of new, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often was necessary.” (p.42)
“[not] possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place” (p.43)
“no other copy existed to contradict it” (p.43)
“never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy” (p.43)
“It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another” (p.43)
“Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of time you were expected to make them up out of your head.” (p.43)
“All one knew that every quarter astronomical numbers of boot were produced on paper, while perhaps half of the population of Oceania went barefoot.” (p.44)
“shadow world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain” (p.44)
“the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth” (p.48)
“He had no subjects of conversation except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except the defeat of Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of spies, saboteurs, thought-criminals and traitors generally…. create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically” (p.50)

“These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces.” (p.76)
“This was the uniform of the capitalists and no one else was allowed to wear it” (p.76)
“The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value.” (p.102)

“It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.” (p.77)
“It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.” (p.78)
“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” (p.78)
“But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known.” (p.82)
“Was the Party’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?” (p.82)
“The past not only changed, but changed continuously” (p.83)
“why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious.” (p.83)
“She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths” (p.161)
“Do you realise that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them” (p.162)
“and that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” (p.162)
“but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself.” (p.162)
“The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories” (p.162)

“The hunting down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else.” (p.101)

“What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.” (p.99)
“The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal.” (p.157)
“But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was a sanctuary.” (p.158)

“This was necessary, because except by direct enquiry it was never possible to discover where anyone lived. There were no directories of any kind.” (p.166)

“A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete.” (p.190)
“He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the forgery should be perfect” (p.191)

“In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction” (p.208)
“The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already” (p.208)
“arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more and then stop…. but this time, by conscious strategy, the High would be able to maintain their position permanently.” (p.212)
“The cyclical movement of history was now intelligible, or appeared to be so; and if it was intelligible, then it was alterable.” (p.212)
“so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed” (p.216)
“tolerates the present day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison” (p.221)
“It is also so that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness.” (p.222)
“The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.” (p.222)

Technology
The Party is able to monitor its citizens all of the time
1984 reveals that technology, which is generally perceived as working toward moral good, can also facilitate the most diabolical evil.
“With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end” (p.214)
“The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time” (p.214)

Language as Mind Control - Newspeak
Language is of central importance to human thought because its structure and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing.
If control of language is centralised in a political agency, the very structure of the language can be altered to make it impossible to even conceive disobedient or rebellious thoughts, as there are no words to thing them.
The Party is constantly refining and perfecting Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualising anything that might question the Party’s absolute power.
Loss of language is accompanied by the loss of culture and historical connection.
“more newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life.” (p.14)
“When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again.” (p.53)
“destroying words –scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.” (p.54)
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives… After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains the opposite in itself” (p.54)
“In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word.” (p.54)
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In end the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.” (p.55)
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.” (p.55)
“The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” (p.56)
“Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.” (p.57) duckspeak – “It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse; applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.” (p.57)
“Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.” (p.58)
“no way in which discontent can become articulate” (p.216)
“If he is a person naturally orthodox… he will in all circumstances know, without taking thought, what is the true belief or the desirable emotion.” (p.220)
“makes him unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever” (p.220)
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.” (p.220)
“Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity” (p.221)
“orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body” (p.221)
“The key word here is black-white… this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.” (p.221)
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world –view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” (p.312)
“a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.” (p.312)
“since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.” (p.313)
“no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought” (p.313)
“Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept” (p.314)
“intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them” (p.316) – B Vocabulary, for political purposes
“Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that is was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were non-existent.” (p.319)
“meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean” (p.320 ) Ministry names
“In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth” (p.321)
“the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050”(p.326)

Resistance and Rebellion
Emmanuel Goldstein
Justification
Hope to rebel so that rebels can take action
‘Us and them’ mentality
Comparison so that society knows what is wrong
“He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the party… sprang directly out of his teaching.” (p.14)
“It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheeplike quality.” (p.14)
“in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less” (p.15)
“A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police” (p.15)
“Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that other besides him were the enemies of the Party.” (p.19)

“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.” (p.30)
“It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hey.” (p.129)
“Anything to rot, to weaken, to undermine!” (p.132)
“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.” (p.132)
“That all was he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.” (p.132)
“active rebellion against the Party, but with no notion of how to take the first step” (p.159)
“But she refused to believe that widespread, organised opposition existed or could exist.” (p.159)
“Yet she had only the dimmest idea of who Goldstein was and what doctrines he was supposed to represent. She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination… the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.” (p.160)
“I don’t imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime” (p.162)
“By sharing a small act of thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.” (p.165)
“The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.” (p.166)
“He had moved from thoughts to words, and no from words to actions.” (p.166)
“We are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers.” (p.177)
“When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable. But you will have very little to confess, other than your own actions. You will not be able to betray more than a handful of unimportant people.” (p.182)
“The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organisation in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you, except the idea.” (p.183)
“You will have to get used to living without results and without hope.” (p.183)
“There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.” (p.183)
“We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.” (p.184)

“The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals… All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals” (p.239)

“The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms.” (p.265)
“Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him.” (p.266)
“that one must not make martyrs… they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths” (p.266)
“The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten… because the confessions they had made were obviously extorted and untrue… All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into a gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you; not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.” (p.267)
“You are a stain that must be wiped out.” (p.267)
“Om the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it.” (p.267)
“But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was “Thou shalt not”. The command of the totalitarians was “Thou Shalt”. Our command is “Thou art”. No one who we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.” (p.268)
“By the time we had finished with them, they were only the shells of men” (p.268)
“What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority” (p.268)

“But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment – one body hat he could thrust between himself and the rats” (p.300)

Sleeping with Julia again – “His flesh froze with horror at the thought of it.” (p.304)

Fatalism – Control
“Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same.” (p.21)
“Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.” (p.21)
“He was already dead, he reflected” (p.30)
“Now that he had recognised himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible” (p.30)
“She would not accept it was a law of nature that the individual is always defeated.” (p.142)
“We are the dead” (p.142)
“Not physically. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am… So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.” (p.142)
“It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves” (p.146)
“One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.” (p.146)
“In realty there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct.” (p.159)
“The end was contained in the beginning. But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive.” (p.166)
“He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.” (p.167)
“Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history.” (p. 172)

“the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low.” (p.192)
“but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself” (p.192)
“You were the dead; theirs was the future” (p.230)
“The once certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment” (p.292)
“with a feeling if walking in sunlight. He was not any longer in the narrow white corridors of the Ministry of Love, he was in the enormous sunlit passage, a kilometre wide” (p.292)

Motifs
Reoccurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes
Doublethink
Emerges as an important consequence o the Party’s massive campaign of large scale physiological manipulation
The ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time
As the Party’s mind control techniques break down an individuals capacity for independent thought, it becomes possible for an individual to believe anything that the Party tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told.
When, at Hate Week, the Party shifts allegiance, the crowd accepts the change immediately.
People accept that the ministries names contradict their functions. Ministry of Plenty oversees economic shortages, Ministry of Peace oversees war, Ministry of Truth conducts propaganda and historical revision and the Ministry of Love is the centre of the Party’s torture and punishment operations.
“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 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 the promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtly: 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.” (p.38)
“knowledge that is easily neutralised by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that war is real” (p.200)
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which directions his memories must be altered” (p.223)
“The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.” (p.223)
“They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously.” (p.224)
“Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. 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.” (p.225)
“they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only be reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted… then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.” (p.225)
“That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness.” (p.259)
“already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting… Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him” (p.260)

Urban Decay
The London of Oceania is a dilapidated, rundown city with crumbling buildings and conveniences that do not work and necessary utilities that are extremely unreliable.
Widespread hunger and poverty of its inhabitants is due to the Party’s mismanagement and incompetence.
Totalitarian regimes are viciously effective at enhancing their own power and miserably incompetent at providing for their citizens. The decay of London is a visual reminder of this idea.
This offers insight into the Party’s priorities through its contrast to the immense technology the Party develops to spy on its citizens. “One had the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face” (p.22)

“when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. Repairs… had to be sanctioned.” (p.23)
“at any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply” (p.51)
“but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.” (p.77)
“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible and glittering – a world of steel and concrete of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans” (p.77)
“The reality was decaying, dingy cities” (p.77)
“The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward” (p.196)
“The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death and his resurrection.” (p.307)

Wealth
“This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.” (p.197)
“experiment and invention have largely stopped” (p.197)
“but by a sort of automatic process – by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute – the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly” (p.197)
“But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction… of a hierarchical society” (p.197)
“If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction” (p.197)
“to imagine a society in which wealth… should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable.” (p.198)
“did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly… the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before” (p.214)
“no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything.” (p.215)
“economic inequality has been made permanent” (p.215)

Symbols
Big Brother
Big Brother is the face of the Party and Winston can never determine whether he actually exists
The face of Big Brother symbolises the Party in its public manifestation. Big Brother is a reassurance to most people (the warmth of his name suggests his ability to protect) but his open inescapable gaze reminds people that he is a threat.
His vagueness is consistent with that which the inner Party present their own lives. It is impossible to know who really rules Oceania, what life is like for the rulers, or why they act as they do.
Immortal figure

“Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein” (p.17)
“B-B!” – “still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise” (p.19)
“The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you – something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.” (p.83)
“Big Brother is the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world. His function is to act as focusing point for love, fear and reverence, emotions which are more easily felt towards an individual than towards an organisation” (p.217)
“Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows” (p.217)

The Glass Paperweight and St. Clement’s Church
Through the deliberate weakening of people’s memories and the flooding of people’s minds with propaganda, the Party is able to replace individuals’ memories with its own version of the truth.
It is nearly impossible to question the Party’s power in the present when they accept what the Party tells them about the past – that the Party rose to protect them from bloated oppressive capitalists and that the past was far uglier and harsher before the Party assumed power.
Winston struggles to recover his own memories and formulate a larger picture of what has happened to the world. The paperweight symbolises Winston’s attempt to reconnect with the past. Symbolically when the Thought Police capture Winston, the paperweight shatters on the floor.
The old pictures of St. Clement’s Church is another representation of the lost past.
The song remembered is an important foreshadow, as it is the telescreen hidden behind the picture that ultimately leads the Thought Police to Winston, symbolising the Party’s corrupt control of the past.
“the surface of the glass was the dome of the sky, and inside the dome everything was flooeded with clear soft light in which one could see interminable distances” (p.167)

The Place Where There Is No Darkness
The place where there is no darkness instead of being the paradise that Winston imagines is merely a prison cell in which the light is never turned off.
This place symbolises Winston’s approach to the future. Possibly because of his intense fatalism – he believes that he is doomed no matter what he does. He unwisely allows himself to trust O’Brien, even though inwardly he senses that O’Brien might be a Party operative.
“It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O’Brien had seemed to recognise the allusion” (p.241)

The Telescreens
The book’s most visible symbol of the Party’s constant monitoring of its subjects.
The dual capacity to blare constant propaganda and observe citizens demonstrates how totalitarian government can abuse technology for its own ends instead of exploiting its knowledge to improve the lives of citizens.
The Red Armed Prole Woman
Winston’s one legitimate hope for the long term future. That the proles will eventually come to recognise their plight and rebel against the Party.
Winston sees the prole woman as a prime example of reproductive virility, and he often imagines her giving birth to future generations that will finally challenge the Party’s authority.
“a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line” (p.144)
“it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful” (p.228)
“Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, they could pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile body.” (p.228)
“She had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilised fruit and grown hard and red and coarse.” (p.229)

Characters
Winston Smith
His personal tendency to resist the stifling of his individuality, and his intellectual ability to reason about his resistance, enables the reader to observe and understand the harsh oppression of the Party.
Julia is untroubled and somewhat selfish and is interested in rebelling only for the pleasures to be gained. Contrastingly Winston is extremely pensive and curious, desperate to understand how and why the Party exercise such absolute power.
Winston’s other key attributes are rebelliousness and fatalism
Winston hates the Party passionately and wants to test the limits of its power
The effort Winston puts into his attempt to achieve freedom and independence ultimately underscores the Party’s devastating power. Winston’s rebellion is revealed as playing into O’Brien’s campaign of physical and psychological torture, transforming Winston into a loyal subject of Big Brother.
Winston’s essential downfall is his sense of fatalism, which propagates his paranoia about the Party and leads him to take unnecessary risks.
Because he believes that he will be caught no matter what he does, he convinces himself that he must continue to rebel.
The world for Winston is such that legitimate optimism is an impossibility and lacking any real hope, he gives himself false hope, fully aware that he is doing so.
Works in the Records Department
“Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work.” (p.46)
“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.” (p.83)
“He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic.” (p.83)
“the horror was that he might also be wrong” (p.83)
“He felt as though a fire was burning inside his belly” (p.114)
“Then the memory of her face came back, and with it a raging, intolerable desire to be alone.” (p.114)
“I thought I’d take a chance. I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them.” (p.128)
“Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope. Who knew, perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.” (p.131)
“in this game we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.” (p.142)

“His mother was quite ready to give him more than his share. She took it for granted that he, ‘the boy’, should have the biggest portion” (p.169)
“He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it” (p.169)
“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.” (p.226)
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. O’Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death.” (p.264)

Julia
Julia is sensual, pragmatic, generally contempt to live in the moment and make the best of her life.
Julia is concerned about enjoying sex and making practical plans to avoid getting caught by the Party.
Julia is well adapted to her small scale forms of rebellion and has no intention of terminating her pleasure seeking.
Julia is a striking contrast to Winston, as apart from their mutual sexual desire and hatred of the Party, most of their traits are dissimilar.
Works in the Fiction Department
“Her eyes were fixed on his, with an appealing expression that looked more like fear than pain.” (p.111)
“In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone.” (p.111)
“her unmistakable agitation when she handed him the note. Obviously she had been frightened out of her wits, as well she might be. Nor did the idea of refusing her advances even cross his mind.” (p.115)
“You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and deed.” (p.127)
“If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones” (p.135)
“You wanted a good time; ‘they’, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.” (p.137)
“Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine.” (p.138)
“She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organised revolt against the Party, which was bound to failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.” (p.138)
“accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it” (p.138)
“In some ways she was far more acute than Winston , and far less susceptible to Party propaganda.” (p.160)
“She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.” (p.160)
“the fact struck her as totally uninteresting” (p.161)
“It was true that she regarded the whole war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed… It frightened him a little.” (p.161)
“But the issue still struck her as unimportant. ‘Who cares?’ she said impatiently.” (p.161)
“I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m interested in us.” (p.163)
“Your only a rebel from the waist downwards” (p.163)
“she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing” (p.163)
“Talking to her, he realised how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.” (p.163)
“because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested though the body of a bird.” (p.163)

O’Brien
Many of the Party’s inner workings remain unexplained, as do its origins, and the identities and motivations of its leaders. This sense of mystery is centralised in the character of O’Brien, a powerful member of the Inner Party.
He aims to trap Winston in an act of open disloyalty to the Party. Rather than developing as a character throughout the novel the reader ends up knowing less about him than they originally thought.
“They got me long ago” – This reply could signify that O’Brien himself was once rebellious, only to be tortured into passive acceptance of the Party. Once could also argue that he says this only to sympathise with Winston so that he can gain his trust.
The novel leaves O’Brien as a shadowy, symbolic enigma on the fringe of even the more obscure Inner Party.
“He felt deeply drawn to him… merely a hope – that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was not perfect… And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence.” (p.11)
“He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.” (p.256)

Mr Parsons
“He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms – one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.” (p.24)
“Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal.” (p. 62)
“The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporised.” (p.64)
“It’s insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep!” (p.245)
“I’m glad they got me before it went any further” (p.245)

Syme
“In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox.” (p.52)
“Syme will be vaporised. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people.” (p.56)
“one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.” (p.148)
“But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous.” (p.164)

Katharine
“Katharine was a tall, fair-haired girl, very straight, with splendid movements.” (p.69)
“that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her.” (p.69)
“And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength.” (p.70)
“Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and become merely a distasteful one.” (p.139)

Mr Charrington
Slightly freer
Seems to share Winston’s interest in the past and rebellion
Genuine and Winston is ready to trust him even though they are living in such a strict regime
“Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal.” (p.157)
“To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical box.” (p.158)

Winston’s Mother
Winston’s mother’s death – “tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time” (p.32)
“she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return” (p.32)
“the fact that there was never enough to eat” (p.168)
“She seemed to have become completely spiritless” (p.168)
“He was aware, in spite of his youthfulness and selfishness, that this was somehow connected with the never mentioned thing that was about to happen” (p.169)
“The dream was still vivid in his mind, especially the enveloping, protecting gesture of the arm in which its whole meaning seemed to be contained.” (p.171)
“so she had sat in the sunken ship, far underneath him and drowning deeper every minute, but still looking up at him through the darkening water” (p.171)
“yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.” (p.172)
“The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper.” (p.171)