1984 by George Orwell. 

3/5 rating. 

Book #97 of 2019. Read August 16, 2019.

I finally got around to reading this classic. I would say that I enjoyed the first 2/3rds quite a bit, then the last third or so took a bit of a nose-five. I was hoping for a happy ending but didn’t get that. This book feels like a must-read just for the fact that you can say you have read it and discuss “Big Brother” with complete confidence.

Quotes:

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

“And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered.”

“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body.”

“She thought it over. ‘They can’t do that,’ she said finally. ‘It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything – anything – but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.’”

“They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”

“In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”

“The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim – for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives – is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men should be equal.”

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