1984 by George Orwell

• You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
• The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.
• To mark the paper was the decisive act.
• It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
• For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage.
• He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered 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.
• The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
• Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
• For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?
• Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
• Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
• It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.
• For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?
• She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated.
• It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now, but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met.
• The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.
• I'm quite read to take risks, but only for something worth while.
• If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
• 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.
• They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
• Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
• To be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.
• The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
• The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim--for it is an abiding characteristic of the Law that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives--is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
• So long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
• To change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness.
• Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane.
• Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
• Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
• It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.
• No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.
• Alone--free--the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.
• Nothing exists except through human consciousness.
• Everything depends on yourself.
• Everything is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.
• If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
• Death never came at an expected moment.
• If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.
• If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be disobeyed.
• There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover.
• Sometimes they threaten you with something--something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself. And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer.

10/4/10--10:22pm