1984

by George Orwell

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.

What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure forever?

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

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

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

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body.

The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.

“This was an exceptional case. It wasn’t just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been re-painted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.

Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.

A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police. Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he is alone.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.

Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane.

But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word ‘God’ to remain at the end of a line.

“‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’” repeated Winston obediently.

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident.