1984

by George Orwell

Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention.

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And

But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.