Amy’s Reviews > 1984 > Status Update

“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

“The sun on his face and the girl’s smooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring, ‘Sanity is not statistical,’ with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.”

“In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society in tact.”

“It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.”

“He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body that always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. [...]It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but against one’s own body.”

“The diary would be reduced to ash and himself to vapor. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How you 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?”

“How could he communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.”