1984

by George Orwell

It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past.

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.

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

’Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ’controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.

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