1984

by George Orwell

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.

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.

“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 canceled 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—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.

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

you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.

By lack of understanding they remained sane.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper.

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

Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four.

was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

Sanity is not statistical,”

Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’”

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!