Nineteen Eighty-Four (Kindle highlights)

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. (loc. 284-286)
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. (loc. 392-393)
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. (loc. 565-566)
Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed – no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. (loc. 569-570)
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. (loc. 577-579)
Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. (loc. 611-613)
But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. 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 became truth. (loc. 676-678)
The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory? (loc. 692-694)
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 news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. (loc. 755-757)
Sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. (loc. 800-801)
In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. (loc. 929-929)
Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different? (loc. 1041-1042)
To wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (loc. 1073-1074)
In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (loc. 1073-1074)
The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime. (loc. 1156-1156)
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious. (loc. 1191-1192)
And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. (loc. 1206-1207)
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. (loc. 1250-1251)
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. (loc. 1341-1342)
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. (loc. 1400-1402)
What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. (loc. 2075-2076)
The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. (loc. 2150-2152)
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available. (loc. 2352-2354)
‘Who cares?’ she said impatiently. ‘It’s always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.’ (loc. 2385-2386)
In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, 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. (loc. 2415-2418)
In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. (loc. 2902-2903)
War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. (loc. 2993-2995)
As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialised in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilisation. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels. (loc. 3104-3109)
Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. (loc. 3130-3131)
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. (loc. 3260-3261)
If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes. (loc. 3276-3278)
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. (loc. 3313-3314)
It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it. (loc. 3476-3477)
The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they 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 would be free and equal. We are not like that. (loc. 3972-3974)
You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’ (loc. 3996-3997)
‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.’ (loc. 4003-4005)
To die hating them, that was freedom. (loc. 4234-4234)
i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (loc. 5050-5056)