Previous Next

‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’

In this quote from Book One, Chapter 7, Winston speculates that the proletarian masses could plausibly take down the government, while the discontented Party members cannot. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Character: Winston (the first quote).

Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations—that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago.

This passage from Book One, Chapter 7 explains how telescreens don’t just continually monitor the behavior of citizens, but they also inculcate them with propaganda to the point where citizens believe what they are being told, no matter how counterintuitive the message coming from the telescreen is. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Symbol: The Telescreens (the fourth quote).

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

This quote from Winston’s diary in Book One, Chapter 7 informs us about him as a character. From it we can glean that he is intelligent—too intelligent to be taken in by the tricks that the Party is continually pulling on its citizens, and that he’s figured out the mechanisms behind how the Party controls the populace. But the quote also reveals that he yearns to understand more. The rest of the novel will focus on how Winston figures out the why the Party does what it does. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Character: Winston (the second quote).

He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses.

A bit later in Book One, Chapter 7, Winston is focusing again on why the Party controls its citizens when he is momentarily mesmerized by an image of Big Brother in a children’s history book created by the Party. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Symbol: Big Brother (the fourth quote).

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.

The obviously absurd assertion that the Party makes that 2 + 2 = 5 is a crucial and recurring idea in the novel. This is discussed at length in Famous Quotes Explained (the third quote).

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

This closing passage in Book One, Chapter 7 furthers the significance to the novel of the Party’s “2 + 2 = 5” claim. It is discussed further in Quotes by Theme: Hopes for Resistance and Revolution (the second quote).

Previous section Book One, Chapter 6 Next section Book One, Chapter 8

Popular pages: 1984

Take a Study Break