War is PEACE
FREEDOM is slavery
IGNORANCE is strength
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, where men are different from one another and do not live alone--to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: Thoughtcrime is death.
Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred and pain, but no dignity of emotion, of deep complex sorrows.
But though slightly drunk, he was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and could never be remedied had just happened.
If the party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened--that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself--that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious to the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the world "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.
Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless once had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different.
But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything is mixed up with fear and hatred.
But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
Nothing exists except through human consciousness.
By itself, pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But fore everyone there is something unendurable--something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved.