Quotes for Friday from George Orwell's 1984

Curiously, the chiming of the hour seeming to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long, as he utter it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

Page 26

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that  Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as your years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it; in Newspeak, "doublethink."

Page 32

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. 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 - that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce consciousness, 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.

Page 32/33

"When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three Year Plan and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?"

Page 110/111

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

Page 126

"... Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, had been actually abolished? ...

Page 128

The end was contained in the beginning.

Page 132

The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

Page 165

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Page 179

Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. 

Page 205

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