Fifth Passage from 1984

Winston turned around abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-colored bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colorless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club.

The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.

Fourth Set of Passages from 1984

"Sometimes, indeed, you could put yout finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the party had invented airplanes." (Page 36)


"The process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance....All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary". (Pages 39 - 40)


"There were occassions when Big Brother devoted his Order for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file Party member whose life and death he held up as an example worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate Comrade Ogilvy, It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence....Big Brother added a few remakrs on the purity and singlemindedness of Comrade Ogily's life. He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker, and he had taken a vow of celibacy, belivieving marriage and the care of a family to be incomaptible with a twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty." (Pages 46 - 47)

Third Set of Passages from 1984

"The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. 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....The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.....There were even organizations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes."

(Page 65)

"The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it. He did not know why this was so, but it seemed natural that it should be so. And so far as the women were concerned, the Party's effors were largely successful." (Page 66)

Second Set of Passages from 1984

"...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 to her. "The human sound track" he nicknamed her in his own mind." (Page 66)


"The women of the Party were all alike. Chastity was as deeply ingrained in them as Party loyalty. By careful early conditioning by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and the martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them."
(Pages 67-8)


"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after the have rebelled they cannot become conscious." (Page 70)


"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, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting -- three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to an fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbages and bad lavatories." (Page 74)

Passages about Russia from "Tragedy and Hope"

In time the ruling class of Russia became acquainted with Byzantine culture. They were dazzled by it, and sought to import it into their wilderness domains in the north. In this way they imposed on the Slav peoples many of the accessories of the Byzantine Empire, such as Orthodox Christianity, the Byzantine alphabet, the Byzantine calendar, the used of domed ecclesiastical architecture, the name Czar (Caesar) for their ruler, and innumerable other traits. Most important of all, they
imported the Byzantine totalitarian autocracy, under which all aspects of life, including political, economic, intellectual, and religious, were regarded as departments of government, under the control of an autocratic ruler. These beliefs were part of the Greek tradition, and were based ultimately on Greek inability to distinguish between state and society....From Byzantium came autocracy and the idea of the state as an absolute power and as a totalitarian power, as well as such important applications of these principles as the idea that the state should control thought and religion, that the Church should be a branch of the government, that law is an enactment of the state, and that the ruler is semi-divine. From the Vikings came the idea that the state is a foreign importation, based on militarism and supported by booty and tribute, that economic innovations are the function of the government, that power rather than law is the basis of social life, and that society, with its people and its property, is the private property of a foreign ruler.

These concepts of the Russian system must be emphasized because they are so foreign to our own traditions. In the West, the Roman Empire (which continued in the East as the Byzantine Empire) disappeared in 476 and, although many efforts were made to revive it, there was clearly a period, about goo, when there was no empire, no state, and no public authority in the West. The state disappeared, yet society continued. So also, religious and economic life continued. This clearly showed that the state and society were not the same thing, that society was the basic entity, and that the state was a crowning, but not essential, cap to the social structure. This experience had revolutionary effects. It was discovered that man can live without a state; this became the basis of Western liberalism. It was discovered that the state, if it exists, must serve men and that it is incorrect to believe that the purpose of men is to serve the state. It was discovered that economic life, religious life, law, and private property can all exist and function effectively without a state.

From this emerged laissez-faire, separation of Church and State, rule of law, and the sanctity of private property. In Rome, in Byzantium, and in Russia, law was regarded as an enactment of a supreme power. In the West, when no supreme power existed, it was discovered that law still existed as the body of rules which govern social life. Thus law was found by observation in the West, not enacted by autocracy as in the East. This meant that authority was established by law and under the law in the West, while authority was established by power and above the law in the East.
The West felt that the rules of economic life were found and not enacted; that individuals had rights independent of, and even opposed to, public authority; that groups could exist, as the Church existed, by right and not by privilege, and without the need to have any charter of incorporation entitling them to exist as a group or act as a group; that groups or individuals could own property as a right and not as a privilege and that such property could not be taken by force but must be taken by established process of law. It was emphasized in the West that the way a thing was done was more important than what was done, while in the East what was done was far more significant than the way in which it was done.