Ch5

• 1.5

  Winston is eating lunch with Symes and Parsons. Symes is discussing the 11th edition of the Newspeak dictionary and Parsons shows his constant admiration of the Party.
• ‘We’re destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone.’
• ‘In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning.’
• ‘Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’
• ‘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 in which to express it.’
• ‘Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.’
• ‘By 2050 - earlier, probably -all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed.’
• ‘How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished?’
• ‘Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
• Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal.
• How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal - tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree - existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-flavoured.