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1984

By George Orwell


As he put his hand to the doorknob Winston saw that he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceivably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.

Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

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 Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?

By lack of understanding they remained sane.

The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

The idea of an earthly paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhoo, without laws and without brute labor, has haunted the human imagination for thousands of years.

Being in a minority, even a minority of one did not make you mad. There was truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

You are a flaw in the pattern, Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquising it. 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. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and puting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

@ Alexis Ettner 2004