1984

Quote: "There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast. He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected..." (Page 82) What I Have to Say: This serves as a great example for how Winston and most likely the rest of the citizens of Oceania have become desensitization. Throughout the book we have seen how Winston is very aware of all of the shady things going on; he notes how history is constantly being rewritten, how openly the government lies about production statistics, how 85% of the population is held to different standards, and how the Party enforces a very solitary existence to limi...

On Intelligence Through Perception and the Danger of Being Perceptive "In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love." (63)  "'You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.’" (65) "'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. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its sub...