In 1949 the George Orwell fiction novel 1984 was published, and since is recognized as a classic of epic proportion. For those unfamiliar, the story is a cautionary tale that revolves around a futuristic dystopian society. The author describes a people encumbered by a “Ministry of Truth,” and dominated by a surveillance totalitarian state. Its primary goal is to deceive the people by redefining the truth through mind control. Propaganda, censorship, and a repressive regiment are devices the governing body - “Big Brother”- employs to control the people within society.
Almost 75 years have passed, and 1984 is still a cultural phenomenon, and often a topic of discussion today whenever the information involved resembles the author’s words. There are numerous parts in the book, including what the author wrote and how it applies to reality in post-modern America, and the political and social narrative. The following are quotes from 1984, which resemble what some of us encounter today.
- They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is for purposes of war, and the object of waging war is always to be in a better position in which to wage war.
- Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived since before the revolution. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.
- The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final and most essential command.
- I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
- One knows the news is all lies anyway.
- 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 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.
- Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thought crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.
- Power is not a means; it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution.
- How does one man assert his power over another, Winston? By making him suffer (Winston) said. 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?
- Freedom is the Freedom to say that two plus two makes four.
- The Ministry of Peace concern itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
- Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting them both.
- Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered.
- We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and friends.
- The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books and more babies - more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity.
George Orwell is considered an author of significant consequence. But judging by his novel 1984, I believe we can also recognize him as prophet. He seems to have had an uncanny knack to put his finger on social, political, and cultural issues that have lived on beyond his time.
