Animal Farm and 1984

by George Orwell

“Then where does the past exist, if at all?”

“In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”

“you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.

You must humble yourself before you can become sane.”

“Do you remember,” he went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four?” “Yes,”

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” “Four.” “And if the Party says that it is not four but five—then how many?” “Four.” The word ended in a gasp of pain.

pg 249

“How many fingers, Winston?” “Four.” The needle went up to sixty. “How many fingers, Winston?” “Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!” The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four. “How many fingers, Winston?” “Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!” “How many fingers, Winston?” “Five! Five! Five!” “No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?”

pg 250

“Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!”

He had the feeling that O’Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O’Brien who would save him from it.

pg 250

“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

pg 250~251

“How many fingers, Winston?” “Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.”

“Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?” “Really to see them.” “Again,” said O’Brien.

pg 251

“I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six—in all honesty I don’t know.” “Better,” said O’Brien.

pg 252

He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment, and not merely because he had stopped the pain. The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O’Brien was a person who could be talked to.

pg 252

“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?” “To make them confess.” “No, that is not the reason. Try again.” “To punish them.” “No!”

pg 253

To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act; the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

“The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms.

pg 253

In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant; in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs.

Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inq...

pg 253

All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.”

pg 254

“You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission.

When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him.

pg 255

The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’ No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean. Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed—Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford—in the end we broke them down.

pg 255

By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that they could die while their minds were still clean.”

“Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us.

What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

pg 256

Two soft pads, which felt slightly moist, clamped themselves against Winston’s temples.

At this moment there was a devastating explosion, or what seemed like an explosion, though it was not certain whether there was any noise. There was undoubtedly a blinding flash of light. Winston was not hurt, only prostrated. Although he had already been lying on his back when the thing happened, he had a curious feeling that he had been knocked into that position. A terrific, painless blow had flattened him out. Also something had happened inside his head. As his eyes regained their focus he remembered who he was, and where he was, and recognized the face that was gazing into his own; but somewhere or other there was a large patch of emptiness, as though a piece had been taken out of his brain.

“I don’t remember.” “Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Do you remember that now?” “Yes.” “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war. Do you remember that?” “Yes.” “Eleven years ago you created a legend about three men who had been condemned to death for treachery. You pretended that you had seen a piece of paper which proved them innocent. No such piece of paper ever existed. You invented it, and later you grew to believe in it. You remember now the very moment at which you first invented it. Do you remember that?” “Yes.”

“Yes.” O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed. “There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?” “Yes.” And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity.

“You see now,” said O’Brien, “that it is at any rate possible.” “Yes,” said Winston.

“What have you done with Julia?” said Winston. O’Brien smiled again. “She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately—unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness—everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.”

pg 259

“Does Big Brother exist?” “Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.” “Does he exist in the same way as I exist?” “You do not exist,” said O’Brien.

pg 259

“It is of no importance. He exists.” “Will Big Brother ever die?” “Of course not. How could he die? Next question.” “Does the Brotherhood exist?” “That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live, it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.”

pg 260

“What is in Room 101?” The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily: “You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.”

pg 260

“THERE ARE THREE STAGES in your reintegration,” said O’Brien. “There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage.”

“I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.”

pg 261

Now tell me why we cling to power. What is our motive? Why should we want power? Go on, speak,” he added as Winston remained silent.

pg 262

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.

pg 263

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.

pg 263

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

“We are the priests of power,” he said. “God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned.

pg 264

The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: ‘Freedom is Slavery.’ Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom.

Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the...

The second thing for you to realize is that power is power...

“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.”

pg 264-265

Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.”

pg 265

us to produce a dual system of