Censorship In 1984 Quotes

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.

In his book The Captive Mind, written in 1951-2 and published in the West in 1953, the Polish poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz paid Orwell one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another. Milosz had seen the Stalinisation of Eastern Europe from the inside, as a cultural official. He wrote, of his fellow-sufferers: A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life. Only one or two years after Orwell’s death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party.

Eventually, as told in 1984, the masses lose the ability to form independent thoughts. The Party can convince them that anything is true.

The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition. (...) We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. (...) It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good', for instance. If you have a word like 'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well (...). Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good', what sense is there in have a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' is you want something stronger still (...). Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? (...) Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it. —Nelba Blandón, Interior Ministry Director of Censorship, quoted in The New York Times, 1984

We now live in an information deluge only dystopian novelists could have foreseen. In the introduction to his landmark book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman contrasted two very different cultural warnings, those of George Orwell’s 1984 and of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell argued that books would disappear by censorship; Huxley thought books would be marginalized by data torrent. Postman summarizes the contrast well. “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”2 Huxley seems to have won.

According to Sendy Guerrier, a UD administrator, students “should be confronted with this information at every turn.”11 Guerrier also wrote that the program should “leave a mental footprint on their consciousness,” apparently missing the echo of the villain from George Orwell’s 1984.