1984 - George Orwell

[HuckfromScandal]

Quote from 1984

“Every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.....history has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.”

Would quite like a thread of quotes that sum up life in 2020 based on George Orwell’s 1984.

Please add the ones that resonate with you.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

I need to read it again.

I haven’t been able to pick it up for the past 6 years or so, and even more so in the past 3 years, because it’s too fucking true and I knew I’d get too angry and too sad.

But I am ready now.

I was thinking of this just this morning.

The ending especially seemed apt when Benjamin and the other animals look in the window at the pigs and humans together and they cannot discern animal from human.

Also Boxer the horse. Boxer the horses broke my heart when I was a kid. Worse then Black Beauty is was.

Which is ironic because as a little girl I desperately wanted to be a horse. All my early romantic fantasies centred about me being a wild horse and being courted by a stallion with quivering nostrils, heaving flanks and a beautiful mane.

I was trans-equine but grew out of it :)

hoodathunkit that's Animal Farm (also very good)

I am currently rereading it. This is Syme; who is working on the Newspeak dictionary; to Winston.

In your heart, you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.. Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words to express it... The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Byron- they'll only exist in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be... How could you have a slogan like 'Freedom is slavery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different... Orthodoxy means not thinking- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness

It is indeed AmericanSlang

sore eyes, in hurry misread the title, apologies

:)

If reader fancy watching the film Animal Farm it's on youtube

as you were :)

Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

BovaryX that's a great passage. I can't reread 1984 because it's too depressing in the current climate. I have recently read The Ministry of Truth: a biography of 1984, which is really good

hoodathunkit Orwell generally needs to be compulsory reading for the woke generation - "Orwell on Truth" is a good read, he wrote so much that is relevant to what is happening today

I propose a slight change to the thread, if @HuckfromScandal approves - truths as spoken by Orwell, perhaps?

BovaryX Yep! That's the passage that I had scribbled out on various text books over the years!

And fighting the comfort of orthodoxy is no less needed now than any other time.

@AmericanSlang it is compulsory reading at GCSE age!
George Orwell is an amazing writer, I'm re-reading 1984 again.

@hoodathunkit the whole thing with JKR had ‘some animals are more equal’ sloshing around my head for a few days.

Compulsory reading but completely devoid of any real understanding, I would venture.

The Marxists of our time would seriously quote 1984 thinking they are the good guys.

I think at GCSE it's probably taught as fiction rather than political satire? What we need is an Orwell course in the first year of university, to teach skills in critiquing ideas and ideologies, rather than the current trend towards blindly accepting the latest groupthink (I'm only partly joking)

ninkathink Orwell was rejected by them years ago, he's a colonialist for a start (was in Burma) - I doubt that any of them even read his stuff, it might hurt them

Yes quite.

But if someone told them to quote him, they would do so without any understanding and self awareness whatsoever.

Twitter is basically the 2 minute hate and I think there’s shades of the Junior Anti Sex league going on, but that’s just a feeling. I haven’t read it in years. Don’t even think I have a copy anymore.

I’ve been wondering what to read next. I think I might read the entire body of his works, if I can get ahold of them.

ninkanink agreed :( he must be rolling in his grave.
I agree with Delirium too, the trend of spying on people's Twitter accounts and reporting them for wrongthink is very 1984 and we've already had the police knocking on people's doors accusing them of thought crimes

Twitter is basically the 2 minute hate

Fuck! You are right!

.. or not to fuck, if the JASL are involved.

Funny that! JASL and Jazzle, as used in more current phrases!!!

"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?"

There is so much in Nineteen Eighty-Four that is relevant today. As a PP said, there's Twitter, which is the two-minute hate; there's Newspeak, designed to restrict and limit the range of available thoughts; there's the deliberate repetition of falsehoods and rewriting of history (e.g. "War is Peace", "We have always been at war with Eastasia" - or "trans women are women"); there's doublethink (believing two contradictory things at the same time); there's even prolefeed (cultural pap designed to entertain and soothe the masses).

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows," Winston says. Today that would be: "Freedom is the freedom to say that biological sex is real. If that is granted, all else follows."

*If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"

That is such a powerful quote, DickKerr. It's absolutely spot on. If gender identity only exists in the mind, and the mind is controllable - what then?