1984

Book 3 Chapter 4 - Surrender "He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past had never been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed; he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self deception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was swimming agaisnt 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. Nothing had changed except your own attitude. "  (page 228-229)      At this point of the book, Winston has given into the Party's wishes. He has accepted everything. He says that Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford have always been guilty and the P...

Book 3 Chapter 1 - Torture " "Do anything to me!" he yelled. "You've been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die. Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I’ll tell you anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do to them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six years old. You can take the whole lot of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not Room 101!" "  (page 24)      Winston is in a cell with six other people, including the skull-faced man and the chinless man. The guards had been very forceful and aggressive with the chinless man that they even attacked him in the cell. This obviously wouldn't be the first nor last time they would do something like this. The skull-faced man was dying from starvation. When one of the guards was going t...

Book 2 Chapter 7 - Human Emotion "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.  And yet to the people of only two generations ago this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. 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. 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...

Book 2 Chapter 3 - Extensions of the Thought Police " The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. 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 knew him intimately. "  (page 111)      Julia and Winston have a discussion prior to this passage about the "connection between chastity and political orthodoxy." This leads Winston to think about the ways the Party controlled its citizens through their sexual impulse and their own children. Turning something that is poten...

Book 1 Chapter 7 - Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford " But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, and it must have been to the agents of Eurasia that three dead men had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other changes-two, three,he could not remember how m any.  V ery l ikely the confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took up his pen again and wrote: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY. "   (page 68)   ...

Book 1 Chapter 2 - Child Spies "With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of orthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it...it was all a sort of glorious game to them...It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children." (page 24)      In this passage, Winston is assisting Mrs. Parsons when her children come out. They begin attacking him by calling him a traitor or saying he was guilty of a thought crime. The children pointed makeshift weapons at Winston and the boy even threw objects wit...