1984

by George Orwell

the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

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.

Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same.

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

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

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

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.”

But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.

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

In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.

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

But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

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

What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

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.

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity.

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.