1984 Book Quotes

“He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and 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. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. 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.
The terrible thing that the Party had done 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. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. 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. 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.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Enquanto eles não se tornarem conscientes, jamais se rebelarão; e enquanto eles não se rebelarem, jamais se tornarão conscientes.”
― George Orwell

“لن يثوروا حتى يعوا ولن يعوا إلا بعد أن يثوروا

1984”
― georgeorwell

“Thou Shalt Kill by Stewart Stafford

Today, an official declaration:
"The past's forbidden soil is virgin;
The present, a thunderous chariot,
To glory's gold destiny awaiting us.
Go forth and offer up sacrifices!"

But the blood we spilt was red,
Whichever body it spurted from.
Pleas for help, fused into one.
Witnesses to death grew jaded.

We made the living into the dead,
Forged museums of crowded streets,
In executioners' hoods at limp dawn.
Arising afresh to our deliverance.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I don't imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there - small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.”
― George Orwell

“Trump's dangerousness lies in that he wants to be an autocrat. His dislike for democracy means he won't shy away from holding American institutes hostage to his selfish and delusional fantasies, and go the extra mile to subvert their constitutional and professional integrity.”
― Shafqat Mushtaq, Language, Ideology, and Totalitarianism: Rereading Orwell's 1984 in the Context of Trump's Presidency