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1984: 75th Anniversary Paperback – Unabridged, January 1, 1961
Purchase options and add-ons
This 75th Anniversary Edition includes:
• A New Introduction by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Take My Hand, winner of the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Fiction
• A New Afterword by Sandra Newman, author of Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its own sake and persecutes those who dare to commit thoughtcrimes. But as he starts to think for himself, Winston can’t escape the fact that Big Brother is always watching...
A startling and haunting novel, 1984 creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the novel’s hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.
• Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read •
- Print length328 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Lexile measure1090L
- Dimensions4.2 x 0.8 x 7.5 inches
- PublisherSignet Classic
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1961
- ISBN-109780451524935
- ISBN-13978-0451524935
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine, and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uni- form of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered every- where. The black-mustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the Police Patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live— did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth- century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak*—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Product details
- ASIN : 0451524934
- Publisher : Signet Classic (January 1, 1961)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 328 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780451524935
- ISBN-13 : 978-0451524935
- Reading age : 16+ years, from customers
- Lexile measure : 1090L
- Item Weight : 6.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.2 x 0.8 x 7.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #165 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Dystopian Fiction (Books)
- #4 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #39 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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About the authors

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.
At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.
It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.
Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.
George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

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'Slowly,' said Syme. "I'm on the abjectives. It's fascinating.'
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak ...
'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. ' We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. 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 singe word that will become obsolete before the year 2050 ...
'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words' ...
'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.' "
- George Orwell, '1984'
"Logic, therefore, as the science thought, or the science of the process of pure reason, should be capable of being constructed a priori."
-Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy
("a priori" is defined as deduced from self-evident premises)
By revealing the concept of "Newspeak" in his great dystopian novel '1984', George Orwell, while dying of tuberculosis, cryptically attempted to expose to the world one of the great crimes of government against humanity; the systematic suppression/subversion of essential tools of reasoning; both in language and science. Central to this crime is the deliberate suppression of the science of formal logic. (Formal logic, invented by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., is the science of evaluating arguments in order to determine if they are correctly reasoned. ) I will fully explain.
You see, the masses haven't been taught formal logic by State controlled public schools or media for many generations. (In his book ' The Underground History of American Education' John Taylor Gatto informs his readers that this deliberate dumbing down of the population through State controlled schools was adopted nationwide just after the completion of the U.S. Civil War.) Don't believe me? Just go out and ask some average U.S. adults how to determine if a deductive argument is both valid and sound; or the difference between a formal and an informal logical fallacy. (Both are very basic and essential knowledge of formal logic.) You'll find that not one in twenty have any idea. This is not an accident.
The terrible and murderous lies of our governments rely upon the masses being misinformed, ignorant, and intellectually crippled. And our State controlled schools and media have done this job very well, I'm sorry to say.
"Ignorance is strength."-George Orwell, 1984
The list of criminal conspiracies, committed by the oligarchs who control our governments, are difficult for most people to psychologically accept. They include the subversion of free systems of government, fraud, illegal war, and genocide on an almost unimaginable scale. Here are a few for which the available evidence is simply overwhelming:
(1) Arab terrorists did not carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001.
(2) Man never walked on the moon.
(3) HIV does not, and never did cause AIDS, and our governments have always been aware of this fact.
(4) JFK was not murdered by a lone assassin.
(5) The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which justified U.S. entry into the Vietnam War was a hoax.
(6) The homicidal cyanide gas chambers of the holocaust are a fraud, devised by the Allies to dehumanize the German enemy, and generate support for the people and state of Israel. The Germans never murdered anyone with cyanide gas.
There are many, many more bloody lies, as you will see, if only you will accept George Orwell' s invitation to finally become conscious.
"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within... But the proles, if only somehow they could become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet--!"
-George Orwell, 1984
-------------------------------------------------------
Here are few quote/definitions regarding formal logic that I hope you will find useful.
"Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong."
-Thomas Jefferson
"We ought in fairness to fight our case with no help beyond the bare facts: nothing, therefore, should matter except the proof of those facts."
-Aristotle, Rhetoric
"The truth or falsity of a statement depends on facts, not on any power on the part of the statement itself of admitting contrary qualities".
-Aristotle, Categories
"We suppose ourselves to posses unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other, and further, that the fact could not be other than it is"
-Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
"The province of Logic must be restricted to that portion of our knowledge which consists of inferences from truths previously known; whether those antecedent data be general propositions, or particular observations and perceptions. Logic is not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence. In so far as belief professes to be founded on proof, the office of Logic is to supply a test for ascertaining whether or not the belief is well grounded."
-John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843)
"Fallacious reasoning is just the opposite of what can be called cogent reasoning. We reason cogently when we reason (1) validly; (2) from premises well supported by evidence; and (3) using all relevant evidence we know of. The purpose of avoiding fallacious reasoning is, of course, to increase our chances of reasoning cogently."
-Howard Kahane, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, 1976, second edition
"The fallacy of suppressed evidence is committed when an arguer ignores evidence that would tend to undermine the premises of an otherwise good argument, causing it to be unsound or uncogent. Suppressed evidence is a fallacy of presumption and is closely related to begging the question. As such, it's occurrence does not affect the relationship between premises and conclusion but rather the alleged truth of premises. The fallacy consists in passing off what are at best half-truths as if they were whole truths, thus making what is actually a defective argument appear to be good. The fallacy is especially common among arguers who have a vested interest in the situation ttho which the argument pertains."
-Patrick Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic (1985)
"Aristotle devides all conclusions into logical and dialectical, in the manner described, and then into eristical. (3) Eristic is the method by which the form of the conclusion is correct, but the premises, the material from which it is drawn, are not true, but only appear to be true. Finally (4) sophistic is the method in which the form of the conclusion is false, although it seems correct. These three last properly belong to the art of Controversial Dialectic, as they have no objective truth in view, but only the appearance of it, and pay no regard to truth itself; that is to say, they aim at victory."
-Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy
"The hypothesis most likely to prove right must do the following: 1. Include all known facts; 2. Not over-emphasize any part of the evidence at the expense of the rest; 3. Observe the laws of probability as established by previous investigation; 4. Avoid logical contradictions; 5. Stay as simple as possible without ignoring any part of the evidence. Hypotheses which violate any one of these requirements are Forced Hypotheses."
-James Johnson, Logic and Rhetoric (1968)
"This is the argumentum ad verecundiam. It consists in making an appeal to authority rather than reason, and in using such an authority as may suit the degree of knowledge possessed by your opponent.
Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment, says Seneca; and it is therefore an easy matter if you have an authority on your side which your opponent respects. The more limited his capacity and knowledge, the greater is the number of authorities who weigh with him. But if his capacity and knowledge are of a high order, there are very few; indeed, hardly any at all. He may, perhaps, admit the authority of professional men versed in science or an art or a handicraft of which he knows little or nothing; but even so he will regard it with suspicion. Contrarily, ordinary folk have a deep respect for professional men of every kind. They are unaware that a man who makes a profession of a thing loves it not for the thing itself, but for the money he makes by it; or that it is rare for a man who teaches to know his subject thoroughly; for if he studies it as he ought, he has in most cases no time left in which to teach it...
There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted. Example effects their thought just as it affects their action. They are like sheep following the bell-wether just as he leads them. They will sooner die than think. It is very curious that the universality of an opinion should have so much weight with people, as their own experience might tell them that it's acceptance is an entirely thoughtless and merely imitative process. But it tells them nothing of the kind, because they possess no self-knowledge whatever...
When we come to look into the matter, so-called universal opinion is the opinion of two or three persons; and we should be persuaded of this if we could see the way in which it really arises.
We should find that it is two or three persons who, in the first instance, accepted it, or advanced and maintained it; and of whom people were so good as to believe that they had thoroughly tested it. Then a few other persons, persuaded beforehand that the first were men of the requisite capacity, also accepted the opinion. These, again, were trusted by many others, whose laziness suggested to them that it was better to believe at once, than to go through the troublesome task of testing the matter for themselves. Thus the number of these lazy and credulous adherents grew from day to day; for the opinion had no sooner obtained a fair measure of support than its further supporters attributed this to the fact that the opinion could only have obtained it by the cogency of its arguments. The remainder were then compelled to grant what was universally granted, so as not to pass for unruly persons who resisted opinions which everyone accepted, or pert fellows who thought themselves cleverer than any one else.
When opinion reaches this stage, adhesion becomes a duty; and henceforward the few who are capable of forming a judgment hold their peace. Those who venture to speak are such as are entirely incapable of forming any opinion or any judgment of their own, being merely the echo of others' opinions; and, nevertheless, they defend them with all the greater zeal and intolerance. For what they hate in people who think differently is not so much the different opinions which they profess, as the presumption of wanting to form their own judgment; a presumption of which they themselves are never guilty, as they are very well aware. In short, there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?
Since this is what happens, where is the value of the opinion even of a hundred millions? It is no more established than an historical fact reported by a hundred chroniclers who can be proved to have plagiarised it from one another; the opinion in the end being traceable to a single individual."
-Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy (1831)
I gave the book 5 stars, not because it is the BEST book I've ever read, but because it is a necessary book -especially from the perspective of being banned. In fact, it is a somewhat difficult read - particularly the last 1/3 or so as the walls close in on the protagonist - Winston Smith. He suffers through very dark times and the feelings of isolation, despair, confusion and loneliness are well-conveyed to the reader. Still, I am glad I read it - I don't believe that "Ignorance is Strength", but please don't turn me in to the Thought-Police.
Top reviews from other countries
Writing a critique about Britain’s social stratification and economic inequality in Animal Farm. And, the dangers of the corruption of the revolution. Whilst warning about the great existential threat of authoritarianism in the later story 1984.
In this novel, the author does an excellent job of imagining what ordinary people endure in a modern totalitarian state e.g. Soviet Russia in the past and North Korea today. The deification of the great leader.Mind control through the manipulation of culture (Hate Week), language (Newspeak) and memory (redacting history).
In a mere dictatorship, the masses are cowed by the threat of violence. In the 20th Century, total control would ensure total obedience because people would have no other point of reference. Ordinary people are turned against each other. Dissidents become fervent believers in the state.
In a world full of conflict and fear, there is the great temptation of creating an Islamist state, fundamentalist society, or super empire. One ring to rule them all!!!!
Easy to follow to despite its setting and storylines.
















































