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Seventy-seven years ago today, on Jun 8, 1949 (please check the math; it's never my strongest suit), the British firm Secker & Warburg published George Orwell's ninth, and last, completed book.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was first touted as a novel, but it's come to represent far more than that. Today's quotes of the day:
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. 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.”
There are plenty more.
Please share your own favorites from, and your opinions about, George Orwell's 1984. And anything else that springs to mind in a similar context.
Discussion (22)
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I read 1984 a couple of years ago for the first time, and I was shocked and stunned by its theme. I can still imagine the fellow strapped into a chair with a mask, as rats ran around in the mask. I don't even remember if the book only alluded to them or described them, but it was horrible. And, I think, educational.
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I've been seeing this one shared a lot over the last few years. Young and unmarried women seem to overwhelmingly support Democrats. Remember the Life of Julia campaign the Obama administration ran? An appropriate choice of a name.
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."
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"She's a meter across the hips. Easily."--Winston to Julia, as they observe a Prole housewife hanging laundry. Funny what one remembers after 53 years. .
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"You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him."
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