Animal Farm

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• These books can be read, independently of their time and place, as a strong preventive medicine against the mentality of servility, and especially against the lethal temptation to exchange freedom for security: a bargain that invariably ends up with the surrender of both.
• while the drive to power and corruption and cruelty is certainly latent in human beings, the instinct for liberty is innate as well.
• “And remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.”
• The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership.
• In the general rejoicings the unfortunate affair of the banknotes was forgotten.
• They knew that life nowadays was harsh and bare, that they were often hungry and often cold, and that they were usually working when they were not asleep. But doubtless it had been worse in the old days. They were glad to believe so. Besides, in those days they had been slaves and now they were free, and that made all the difference, as Squealer did not fail to point out.
• Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer—except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.
• ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
• The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
• Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
• The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.
• To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
• How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
• The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
• the frightening thing was that it might all be true. 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.
• But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.
• “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
• Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
• And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
• Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
• Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
• The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.
• For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
• 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.
• Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society.
• Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago.
• In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
• The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
• The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
• again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves, or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty
• They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.
• There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
• Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’”
• Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.
• that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could
• not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves.
• What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
• We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
• The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.
• “Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”