Derek’s Reviews > 1984 > Status Update

"This peculiar linking-together of opposites—knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism—is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them."

"If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate."

"Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expanding labor power without producing anything that can be consumed."

"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."

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right."

"At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong."

"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."

"He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear."

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

"And yet the rage the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlanp.