George Orwell

There is of course no way of knowing whether you are being watched at any given moment.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

For the future, for the unborn.

Actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer the interminable restless
monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

Sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies.

Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flushed through his mind.

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

He is wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself is
the monster.

The past is dead, the future is unimaginable.

Nothing is your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

How could you appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word
scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

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

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love
and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to
know the reason.

All that is needed is an unending series of victories over your own memory.

All history is a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as is necessary.

Most of the material that you are dealing with have no connection with anything in the world, not
even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.

What is needed is a piece of pure fantasy.

@22/01/2022
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We're destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the
language down to the bone.

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

It is not the man's brain that is speaking: it is his larynx. The stuff that is coming out of him
consisted of words, but it is not speech in the true sense: it is a noise uttered in
unconsciousness, like the quaking of a duck.

Your worst enemy is your own nervous system.

A real love affair is an almost unthinkable event.

Untill they become conscious they will never rebel, and untill after they have rebelled they
cannot become conscious.

The capitalists owns everything in the world, and everyone else is their slave.

It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one
accepted without question, was pure fantasy.

The past is erased, the erasure is forgotten, the lies become truth.

We are corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

The past not only changed, but changed continuously.

I understand how: I do not understand why.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself is a lunatic.

The heresy of heresies is commonsense.

Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality is tacitly denied
by our philosophy.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable
— what then?

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

The word kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

You are my delight, my folly, my anodyne, my intellectual stimulant.

When you put it in words it sounded reasonable; it was when you looked at the human beings
passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.

In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's
own body.

What I fear more than anything else is that you might simply change your mind if I don't get in
touch with you quickly. It is like trying to make a move at chess when you are already mated.

Even in my sleep I could not altogether escape from your image.

23rd January, 2022

Privacy is a valuable thing.

It is as though we are intentionally stepping nearer to our graves.

It is curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness.

The room is a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

There are also times when we have the illusion not only of safety but of permanence.

Nothing exists except an endless present.

By lack of understanding we remain sane.

He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions.

The end is contained in the beginning.

If you love someone, you love her, and when you have nothing else to give, you still give her
love.

If you feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever,
you've beaten them.

Facts, at any rate, cannot be kept hidden.

They cannot alter your feelings; for that matter you cannot alter them yourself, even if you
wanted to.

They can lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you have done or said or thought; but the
inner heart, whose workings are mysterious even to yourself, remains impregnable.

You will never have anything to sustain you except the idea.

Physical facts cannot be ignored.

When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.

In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The work is waged by each ruling
group against its own subject and object of the work is not to make or prevent conquest of
territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

A peace that is truly permanent will be the same as a permanent war.

The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that
was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been
possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It 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.

Throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again.
For long periods the High seems to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always
comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves, or their capacity to govern
efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the middle who enlist the Low on their side by
pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached
their objective, the Middle class thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and
themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group split off from one of the other
groups, or from both of them, and the struggles begins over again.

But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has a brought

The idea of earthly Paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without
laws and without brute labor, had haunted the human imagination for thousands of years.

Past events have no objective existence but survive only in written records and in human
memories.

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

In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are
furtherst from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the
delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane.

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

24th January, 2022

He loved her and would not betray her; but that was only a fact, known as he knew the rules of
arithmetic. He felt no love for her, and he hardly even wondered what was happening to her.

It is more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another 10 minutes' life even with
the certainty that there there is death at end of it.

A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact shone
through the dirt and scrubby hair.

Has it ever occurred to you that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the
fact that English language lack rhymes?

He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed whatever was demanded of him.

He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.

Two and two are four. Sometimes, sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three.
Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

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

What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority.

He knew, or he could imagine, the arguments which proved his own nonexistence; but they
were nonsense, they were only a play on words. Did not the statement, "you do not exist,"
contains a logical absurdity? Or what use was it to says so?

As long as you live, it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.

You can grasp the mechanics of the society you lived in, but not its underlying motives.

It was when you thought about 'why' that you doubted your own sanity.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your
arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy.

The party seeks power entirely for its own sake. The party is not interested in the good of
others; they are interested only in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life oor happiness; only
power, pure power.

No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an
end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard revolution; one makes
revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of prosecution is prosecution. The
object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
You are thinking that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am
not even able to prevent the decay of my own body.  Can you not understand that individual is
only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.

The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

Nothing exists except through human consciousness.

Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing.
Outside man there is nothing.

It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure. It
would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

If you are a man, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. You are
outside history, you are non-existent.

It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate
use of logic and the next to br unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was
necessary as intelligence and as difficult to attain.

If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that
is there but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape
that could be given a name.

There are things, your own acts, from which you cannot recover. Something is killed in your
breast; burnt out, cauterized out.

25th January, 2022