1984

George Orwell

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.

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.

He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side?

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present

controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.

How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished?

And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.

The past not only changed, but changed continuously.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

They sye that time ‘eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

But the smiles an’ the tears acrorss the years

They twist my ‘eart-strings yet!

The end was contained in the beginning.

‘I don’t mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.’  

She thought it over. ‘They can’t do that,’ she said finally. ‘It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—ANYTHING—but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.’  

‘No,’ he said a little more hopefully, ‘no; that’s quite true. They can’t get inside you. If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.’

To our Leader: To Emmanuel Goldstein.

The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.

CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity.

World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.

Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.

One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body—but, above all, over the mind.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

Nothing exists except through human consciousness.