Ch8

• 1.8

  Winston goes for a walk in the poorer prole area, goes in a pub and goes back to the shop he bought his diary in.
• In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed.
• The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this.
• It was probable that there were some millions of proles whom the Lottery was the principle if not the only reason for remaining alive.
• he was aware (indeed everyone in the Party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons.
• The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender.
• 'You - the ordinary people, the workers - were their slaves.’
• The Party histories might still be true, after a fashion: they might even be completely true.
• ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’
• And when memory failed and written records were falsified - when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.
• (About the paperweight)

  ‘It is a beautiful thing,’ said the other appreciatively. ‘But there’s not many that’d say so nowadays.’ 

  ‘But who cares about genuine antiques nowadays - even the few that’s left?’

  What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.
• The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960.
• Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages
• The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value.
• (about St Martin’s) It was a museum used for propaganda displays of various kinds
• The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you.
• But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that that had to be gone through: the grovelling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.
• Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess.