So Orwell was prophetic. Worth the read if only to learn how influential the novel has been. The Doublespeak Awards, the thought police, freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4, being a rebel only from the waist down, how if there's hope, it lies with the proles, and why the Party does what it does: Because it can.
One of my favorite parts is Syme's discussion of the beauty of the destruction of language (Syme speaking to the protagonist, Winston):
"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. it isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? …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--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.
Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague uselesss words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still…In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of 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."