3 Quotes from 1984

I recently went through 1984, by George Orwell. These are a few quotes that struck me:

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

-1984 by George Orwell

There was another line I liked a lot. It read, "...the neat handwriting of the illiterate." The phrase summed up a big idea, and I won't jip you for the meaning with words of my own. It is such good writing. I am flipping out about that little phrase and with any luck getting the meaning all wrong right now, but I just love it so much.

2.      "You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."

-O'Brian speaking to Winston in the book 1984 by George Orwell

The insight of this book, other than the looming and impending doom of free society, is that such an end is accomplished by fortifying the preexisting epistemological problems of post-modernity, and that such an end is an end in itself. It is hard to know what is true beyond what has been termed, ‘a justified true belief’. All anyone has to do to control another person is to make them doubt. All they have to do is make the other person try to be sane. Once a person is working at being sane, that person has surrendered their concept of sanity to a third party, which is terrifying, because it does take work to be sane.

3.      “The bird sang. The poles sang. The party did not sing.”

-Winston 1984

This quote hits like a ton of bricks. It goes well with something Hemingway said. He said, “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed by not defeated.” The human soul sings, and everything that does not sing is not human. That is why the book is so powerful. It describes a fate worse than death, a fate worse than destruction. The party defeats its enemies fully, by making them no longer human, no longer man; a moving shell of a once living thing. It freaks me out.

This book is well writen, and quotable from cover to cover. It is a good read. Thanks for reading.