Цитаты из книги «1984»

“What are the stars?” said O’Brien indifferently. “They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.”

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

“Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”

You know the Party slogan: “Freedom is Slavery”. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. But if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body—but, above all, over the mind.”

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that 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 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. Now do you begin to understand me?”

That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves.

It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot.

O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial. “On the contrary,” he said, “YOU have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston.”

“‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past

It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.