Big brother
'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.' It is sixty years since the opening words of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four first appeared. Among the most famous quotations from a book which added many phrases to the language are 'Big brother is watching you' and the evocative image 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever'. Orwell placed great emphasis on the power of words: 'Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them' and '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'.
Orwell's interest in politics was deeply rooted. The English writer Cyril Connolly summed it up by saying 'He could not blow his nose without moralising on the state of the handkerchief industry'. Later politicians such as John Major have borrowed his comments, in his famous reference to 'old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist'. Orwell himself reworked the claim of the Duke of Wellington that 'The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton', saying 'Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there'.
Orwell once said 'political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible'. He had already given the world some famous instances of political language in Animal Farm: 'Four legs good, two legs bad' and 'All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others'. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the outlook is darker: 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'.
Ultimately, Orwell believed that political language was 'designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind'.
For more quotations about politics, try the Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations.
Susan Ratcliffe
19/06/2009
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