1984

by George Orwell

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl: theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother——

one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.

they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

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