5 Important Quotes Explained

1.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

These words are the official slogans of the Party, and are inscribed in massive letters on the white pyramid of the Ministry of Truth, as Winston observes in Book One, Chapter I. Because it is introduced so early in the novel, this creed serves as the reader’s first introduction to the idea of doublethink. By weakening the independence and strength of individuals’ minds and forcing them to live in a constant state of propaganda-induced fear, the Party is able to force its subjects to accept anything it decrees, even if it is entirely illogical—for instance, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of waging war, the Ministry of Love is in charge of political torture, and the Ministry of Truth is in charge of doctoring history books to reflect the Party’s ideology.

That the national slogan of Oceania is equally contradictory is an important testament to the power of the Party’s mass campaign of psychological control. In theory, the Party is able to maintain that “War Is Peace” because having a common enemy keeps the people of Oceania united. “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want. “Ignorance Is Strength” because the inability of the people to recognize these contradictions cements the power of the authoritarian regime.

2.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

This Party slogan appears twice in the novel, once in Book One, Chapter III, when Winston is thinking about the Party’s control of history and memory, and once in Book Three, Chapter II, when Winston, now a prisoner in the Ministry of Love, talks to O’Brien about the nature of the past. The slogan is an important example of the Party’s technique of using false history to break down the psychological independence of its subjects. Control of the past ensures control of the future, because the past can be treated essentially as a set of conditions that justify or encourage future goals: if the past was idyllic, then people will act to re-create it; if the past was nightmarish, then people will act to prevent such circumstances from recurring. The Party creates a past that was a time of misery and slavery from which it claims to have liberated the human race, thus compelling people to work toward the Party’s goals.

The Party has complete political power in the present, enabling it to control the way in which its subjects think about and interpret the past: every history book reflects Party ideology, and individuals are forbidden from keeping mementos of their own pasts, such as photographs and documents. As a result, the citizens of Oceania have a very short, fuzzy memory, and are willing to believe anything that the Party tells them. In the second appearance of this quote, O’Brien tells Winston that the past has no concrete existence and that it is real only in the minds of human beings. O’Brien is essentially arguing that because the Party’s version of the past is what people believe, that past, though it has no basis in real events, has become the truth.

3.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

This quote occurs in Book One, Chapter VII, as Winston looks at a children’s history book and marvels at the Party’s control of the human mind. These lines play into the theme of psychological manipulation. In this case, Winston considers the Party’s exploitation of its fearful subjects as a means to suppress the intellectual notion of objective reality. If the universe exists only in the mind, and the Party controls the mind, then the Party controls the universe. As Winston thinks, “For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” The mathematical sentence 2 + 2 = 5 thus becomes a motif linked to the theme of psychological independence. Early in the novel, Winston writes that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” The motif comes full circle at the end of the novel after the torture Winston suffers in the Ministry of Love breaks his soul; he sits at the Chestnut Tree Café and traces “2 + 2 = 5” in the dust on his table.

4.

And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

This quote from Book One, Chapter VIII, emphasizes how one’s understanding of the past affects one’s attitude about the present. Winston has just had a frustrating conversation with an old man about life before the Revolution, and he realizes that the Party has deliberately set out to weaken people’s memories in order to render them unable to challenge what the Party claims about the present. If no one remembers life before the Revolution, then no one can say that the Party has failed mankind by forcing people to live in conditions of poverty, filth, ignorance, and hunger. Rather, the Party uses rewritten history books and falsified records to prove its good deeds.

5.

And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.

Julia speaks these lines to Winston in Book Three, Chapter VI, as they discuss what happened to them in Room 101. She tells him that she wanted her torture to be shifted to him, and he responds that he felt exactly the same way. These acts of mutual betrayal represent the Party’s final psychological victory. Soon after their respective experiences in Room 101, Winston and Julia are set free as they no longer pose a threat to the Party. Here, Julia says that despite her efforts to make herself feel better, she knows that in order to save herself she really did want the Party to torture Winston. In the end, the Party proves to Winston and Julia that no moral conviction or emotional loyalty is strong enough to withstand torture. Physical pain and fear will always cause people to betray their convictions if doing so will end their suffering.

Winston comes to a similar conclusion during his own stint at the Ministry of Love, bringing to its culmination the novel’s theme of physical control: control over the body ultimately grants the Party control over the mind. As with most of the Party’s techniques, there is an extremely ironic strain of doublethink running underneath: self-love and self-preservation, the underlying components of individualism and independence, lead one to fear pain and suffering, ultimately causing one to accept the principles of anti-individualist collectivism that allows the Party to thrive.

 

QUOTES

‘1984’ quotes task

Provide the context for these quotes ( when is it said and in response to what ), who said them and to

whom, comment on their message/s or significance, link them to other parts of the novel and use them

( or parts of them ) in your commentary

First collect the facts you will need and then write each one up in prose.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

“War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and

accepting both of them.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”

“Big Brother is Watching You.”

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become

conscious.”

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order

to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The

object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own

choosing.”

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness

“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

“Being in a minority, even in 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.”

“You are a slow learner, Winston.”

“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at

once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the

past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is

controllable – what then?”

“Sanity is not statistical.”

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were

“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me

stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical

pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

Psychological Manipulation

The Party barrages its subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought. The giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. The telescreens also monitor behavior—everywhere they go, citizens are continuously reminded, especially by means of the omnipresent signs reading “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,” that the authorities are scrutinizing them. The Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party. The Party also forces individuals to suppress their sexual desires, treating sex as merely a procreative duty whose end is the creation of new Party members. The Party then channels people’s pent-up frustration and emotion into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the Party’s political enemies. Many of these enemies have been invented by the Party expressly for this purpose.

JULIA

Julia is Winston’s lover and the only other person who Winston can be sure hates the Party and wishes to rebel against it as he does. Whereas Winston is restless, fatalistic, and concerned about large-scale social issues, Julia is sensual, pragmatic, and generally content to live in the moment and make the best of her life. Winston longs to join the Brotherhood and read Emmanuel Goldstein’s abstract manifesto; Julia is more concerned with enjoying sex and making practical plans to avoid getting caught by the Party. Winston essentially sees their affair as temporary; his fatalistic attitude makes him unable to imagine his relationship with Julia lasting very long. Julia, on the other hand, is well adapted to her chosen forms of small-scale rebellion. She claims to have had affairs with various Party members, and has no intention of terminating her pleasure seeking, or of being caught (her involvement with Winston is what leads to her capture). Julia is a striking contrast to Winston: apart from their mutual sexual desire and hatred of the Party, most of their traits are dissimilar, if not contradictory.

 

TWO MINUTES HATE

Two Minutes Hate (p.13-19 / 01 – 16:17), from George Orwell‘s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must watch a film depicting the Party’s enemies (notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them.

The film and its accompanying auditory and visual cues (which include a grinding noise that Orwell describes as “of some monstrous machine running without oil”) are a form of brainwashing to Party members, attempting to whip them into a frenzy of hatred and loathing for Emmanuel Goldstein and the current enemy superstate. Apparently, it is not uncommon for those caught up in the hate to physically assault the telescreen, as Julia does during the scene.

The film becomes more surreal as it progresses, with Goldstein’s face morphing into a sheep as enemy soldiers advance on the viewers, before one such soldiercharges at the screensubmachine gun blazing. He morphs, finally, into the face of Big Brother at the end of the two minutes. At the end, the mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted viewers chant “B-B!…B-B!” over and over again, ritualistically.

Within the book, the purpose of the Hate is said to satisfy the citizens’ subdued feelings of angst and hatred from leading such a wretched, controlled existence. By re-directing these subconscious feelings away from the Oceanian government and toward external enemies (which likely do not even exist), the Party minimizes subversive thought and behavior.

In the first Two Minutes Hate of the book, the audience is introduced to Inner Party member and key character O’Brien. Within the novel, hate week is an extrapolation of the two-minute period into an annual week-long festival.

Answer all questions of p.8 of Nelson book.

 

‘Pyramids of corpses’ defy Utopian ideal

Orwell’s dream of liberty and equality still has the power to move, writesRobert Manne. But a century after his birth it remains illusory.

Last Wednesday the world celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell, the man I regard as the greatest political writer of the 20th century.

I first encountered Orwell in the late 1960s. My political identity at that time had been shaped by the shock delivered by the knowledge that, in the decade before I was born, the Nazis had systematically set about the murder of my family and my people. Because of Nazism, my politics were of the left.

It was Orwell who complicated my political identity. For it was he who explained most straightforwardly the implications of the Stalinist catastrophe. A passage from a letter he wrote in 1939 transformed my political outlook.

“The thing that frightens me about the modern intelligentsia,” Orwell wrote, “is their inability to see that human society must be based on human decency . . . there is something wrong with a regime that needs a pyramid of corpses every few years.”

Being an anti-communist did not mean for Orwell the severing of a connection with the left. What he knew was the grotesqueness of any socialism that did not begin with a complete repudiation of the “Soviet myth”. Towards the end of his life Orwell explained: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”

During the Cold War, because of his anti-communism, Orwell was regarded with deep suspicion by the left. While the right lionised him, they somehow managed not to notice that he was a revolutionary socialist.

Since the end of the Cold War, Orwell’s influence has, if anything, grown. No year passes without new editions of his books or new critical biographies. On the surface this seems odd. Since the Soviet collapse, Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism have lost their relevance. Virtually no one any longer genuinely believes in socialism, democratic or otherwise. Orwell’s nightmare has lifted. His great hope has faded. Yet of all the political writers of the last century it is he who has endured the best. There is no other writer whose opinions about the present age we would now be more eager to hear.

Why? It is not enough to talk about the lucidity of his mind or the entire absence in him of cant. Some deeper explanation seems required.

Since the French Revolution all Western societies have been haunted by its two great ideals – liberty and equality. In my opinion, of all recent writers no one was more faithful to the spirit of these ideals than George Orwell. It was because of his love of liberty and equality, which shine through every page he wrote, that his influence has managed to outlive the particular nightmares and dreams to which he devoted his life.

Orwell’s serious political thinking began with his involvement on the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. What Orwell experienced were the brutal attempts by the pro-communist forces to crush their Republican opponents, the Anarchists and Trotskyists.

From this experience all his subsequent political writing flowed. Through the power of his political imagination, Orwell’s fleeting experience of the suppression behind Republican lines in Spain led him to an understanding of the atmosphere of the totalitarian state.

On the basis of the astonishing dishonesty of the ideologues and the press concerning what was happening in Spain, Orwell came to fear a future world from which the ideal of objective truth had vanished and where those who held power were able to control the future through their control over the past. It was in Spain, moreover, that Orwell first saw the peculiar corruption to which those intellectuals who attached themselves to a country or a cause were prone.

For Orwell the essence of totalitarianism was the attack it waged against freedom. After Spain he lived with a permanent dread that the liberal civilisation into which he had been born was gradually being destroyed. This was the source of 1984, the most important warning he wrote about the abuse of absolute state power in the technological age.

But Orwell did not love only liberty. He also loved equality. In Republican Spain he fleetingly experienced a world where “the working class was in the saddle”. This was the kind of world in which Orwell wanted to live. His great Russian Revolution fable, Animal Farm, is essentially the story of the hope for equality cruelly betrayed.

Orwell’s dreams were not complex. He fought throughout his life, as he once put it, for a world where all individuals would have enough to eat and no fear of being unemployed. He did not believe that the superwealthy and the abjectly poor could share a common universe. When he outlined his program for socialism, at its heart was the demand that no one should earn more than 10 times as much as anyone else. Nor was Orwell’s passion for equality restricted to people of the West. He once asked whether it really was too much to try “to raise the standard of living of the whole world” to that of the average Briton of his day.

Equality is nowadays an unfashionable ideal. Yet I rarely discover a student who, after reading Orwell on equality, has failed to be moved or unnerved.

During the Cold War, the anti-communist right embraced Orwell for his defence of classical liberal principles against the totalitarian left. They rarely took seriously his revolutionary socialism and his loathing of privilege, which made him then, and make him still, essentially a man of the left.

In my opinion Orwell’s greatest failure as a writer was his unwillingness to think seriously about the tension between the ideals he loved, liberty and equality. Even in his own age, intelligent liberals argued that in any advanced industrial society the kind of equality of which Orwell dreamed could only be achieved by the creation of the kind of oppressive state he loathed.

On one occasion Orwell wrote a brief review of the most important anti-socialist manifesto of the 20th century, Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Orwell was honest enough to admit the truth of Hayek’s warning that a “collectivist” economy gives to a “tyrannical minority” terrible potential power. But because he believed that the evils of laissez faire capitalism were even worse, all he could offer as an answer to Hayek was a politics where “the concept of right and wrong” had been restored. This is astonishingly lame. In the end, because Orwell’s democratic socialism was founded on ethics rather than economics, it proved utterly vulnerable to the power of the neo-liberal critique.

Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University.

[SOURCE]

1984 — About the book

In 1949, on the heels of another literary classic, Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote 1984, his now legendary and terrifying glimpse into the future. His vision of an omni-present and ultra-repressive State is rooted in the ominous world events of Orwell’s own time and is given shape and substance by his astute play on our own fears.

As the novel opens, we learn that in year 1984, the world has been divided into three states: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, all of which, it is said, are almost continually in battle with one another. This world structure has come about following a nuclear war which took place sometime in the 1950’s. In the state of Oceania, a revolution has resulted in the rise of an all-seeing figurehead known only as Big Brother, and a secretive group of individuals referred to as The Party. Under this regime, basic freedoms of expression-even thought-are strictly forbidden. History and memory are actively erased and rewritten so as to support the omnipotence and infallibility of The Party and its pronouncements. To this end, the State even employs its own language, Newspeak, and its own thought process, Doublethink.

It’s against this background that we are introduced to Winston Smith, a low-level Party member (not to be confused with the elite group which surrounds Big Brother) who works in the Ministry of Truth. His job here, paradoxically, is to destroy and rewrite news articles and State facts and figures so as to align them with the most current views of The Party. A resident of Airstrip One-formerly London, England-Smith lives in a world devoid of even the simplest liberties. In this repressive society, where thoughts themselves can be ascertained and monitored, Winston finds himself alone and in quiet “revolution” against Big Brother. Boldly, he even goes as far as to write his own thoughts down on paper- a crime worthy of abduction by the Thought Police.

Early in the novel, Winston meets Julia, another worker at the Ministry of Truth, whom he has been watching from afar. Secretly, the two begin a love affair. This liaison inspires Winston to indulge his ever-growing obsession with revolution, and he and Julia begin to discuss, however implausible, ideas for the overthrow of The Party. Winston’s eventual (and inevitable) capture at the hands of the Thought Police leads to his purification and re-education by inner Party members.

Orwell’s strict attention to detail and realistic description of a world thirty-five years ahead of his own add validity to 1984, and make its larger conclusions all the more frightening. Even today, the novel remains a bleak and shadowy forewarning of what might someday occur.

The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif

The main character in the novel is a man named Najaf who arrived in Australia as an asylum seeker after being picked up on Ashmore Reef with a group of people after fleeing war in his home country of Afghanistan. The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif is Najaf’s memoir of living with that conflict. The novel attempts to illustrate the far reaching ramifications of war on individuals and communities.

Encountering Confilct in The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif

The text raises questions about the justness of war. Is it fair and reasonable that civilians suffer? Does war ever result in positive social change? It explores how ordinary people like Najaf cope with incessant conflict. It shows how some people take side and how others, like Najaf, are resilient overcoming tragedies and continuing to live peaceful and productive lives. The text is a celebration of hope and the resilience of the human spirit.

 

Ideas in the text

Conflict has far-reaching consequences

The text highlights the many and varied ways in which conflict affects individuals and communities.

 

Conflict is futile

Explore the idea that there are no winners and no change brought about by war only more fighting.

 

Conflict opposes humanity

Najaf is a man who believes in honesty, respect and the value of each person.

 

Conflict is unfair

The text’s main concern is with the people who try to live ordinary lives while a war they did not want and did not start rages around them.

 

People can survive conflict

The text shows that people are not necessarily harden or brutalized by their encounters with conflict.

 

Individual experiences of conflict are not unique

Najaf is one individual among many civilians in Afghanistan who have had similar experiences when encountering conflict.

MERCUTIO

Mercutio, the witty skeptic, is a foil for Romeo, the young Petrarchan lover. Mercutio mocks Romeo’s vision of love and the poetic devices he uses to express his emotions:

Romeo, Humors! Madman! Passion! Lover!
Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh,
Speak but one rhyme and I am satisfied.
(II.1.7-9)

Mercutio is an anti-romantic character who, like Juliet‘s Nurse, regards love as an exclusively physical pursuit. He advocates an adversarial concept of love that contrasts sharply with Romeo’s idealized notion of romantic union. In Act I, Scene 4, when Romeo describes his love for Rosaline using the image of love as a rose with thorns, Mercutio mocks this conventional device by punning bawdily:

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking and you beat love down.
(I.4.27-28)

The Queen Mab speech in Act I, Scene 4, displays Mercutio’s eloquence and vivid imagination, while illustrating his cynical side. Mercutio, unlike Romeo, doesn’t believe that dreams can act as portents. Fairies predominate in the dream world Mercutio presents, and dreams are merely the result of the anxieties and desires of those who sleep.

Mercutio’s speech, while building tension for Romeo’s first meeting with Juliet at the Capulet ball, indicates that although Mercutio is Romeo’s friend, he can never be his confidant. As the play progresses, Mercutio remains unaware of Romeo’s love and subsequent marriage to Juliet.

When Mercutio hears of Tybalt’s challenge to Romeo, he is amused because he regards Romeo as a lover whose experience of conflict is limited to the world of love. So he scornfully asks: “And is he such a man to encounter Tybalt?” (II.3.16-17). Mercutio seems to exist outside the two dominant spheres of Verona because he takes neither the world of love nor the feud seriously. However, Mercutio, like Tybalt, is quick-tempered and they are both ready to draw their swords at the slightest provocation.

Mercutio is antagonistic toward Tybalt by suggesting that Tybalt is a follower of the new trends in swordsmanship, which he regards as effeminate. Like Tybalt, Mercutio has a strong sense of honor and can’t understand Romeo’s refusal to fight Tybalt, calling it, “O calm, dishonorable, vile submission” (III.1.72). Mercutio demonstrates his loyalty and courage when he takes up Tybalt’s challenge to defend his friend’s name.

The humor with which Mercutio describes his fatal wound confirms his appeal as a comic character: “No ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve” (III.1.94 — 95). Mercutio’s death creates sympathy for Romeo’s enraged, emotional reaction in avenging his friend’s death. His death marks a distinct turning point in the play as tragedy begins to overwhelm comedy, and the fates of the protagonists darken.

[SOURCE]