George Orwell

Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me--

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

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.

If there is hope, it lies in the proles.

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.