Doublethink Quotes

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink”
― George Orwell, 1984

“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 of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when 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!”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.

There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases—doublethink, thought police, 'Some animals are more equal than others'—that he embedded in our language and in our minds. In Orwell's own mind there was an inextricable connection between language and truth, a conviction that by using plain and unambiguous words one could forbid oneself the comfort of certain falsehoods and delusions. Every time you hear a piece of psychobabble or propaganda—'people's princess,' say, or 'collateral damage,' or 'peace initiative'—it is good to have a well-thumbed collection of his essays nearby. His main enemy in discourse was euphemism, just as his main enemy in practice was the abuse of power, and (more important) the slavish willingness of people to submit to it.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Big Brother is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The keyword here is BLACKWHITE. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Ow. Stop that. It hurts my brain.

Isn't your brain distributed through your entire body?

See why I want you to stop with the doublethink?
-Sergeant Schlock & Captain Tagon”
― Howard Tayler, Resident Mad Scientist

“Никому не под силу роль пророка. Никто не знает, что будет, и я не знаю. Но я знаю, что ГУМАНИЗМ — это все-таки ГУМАНИЗМ, а не концлагеря и виселицы. Что нельзя позволять, чтобы из тебя делали идиота. Пока работают сердце и мозг, не должно сдаваться. Особенно вам, молодым, здоровым и деятельным, которым предназначена эта книга, еще раз хочу напомнить об осторожности, об ответственности каждого за судьбу человечества. Люди, друзья! Братья и сестры! Дамы и господа! Отвлекитесь на минуту от своих дел, от своих развлечений. В мире неблагополучно.

Неблагополучно, если кучка носорогов может гнать на смерть тьму людей, и эта тьма послушно идет, сидит, ждет очереди. Если массы людей ввергаются в самое настоящее пожизненное рабство — и послушно становятся рабами. Если запрещаются, сжигаются и выбрасываются на помойку книги. Если миллионы людей от рождения до смерти ни разу не говорят вслух то, что они думают. Если в одном небольшом цилиндре сегодня накопляется энергия, достаточная для испепеления Нью-Йорка, Москвы, Парижа или Берлина, и эти цилиндры круглосуточно носятся над нашими головами, для чего? И что это, если не шаги варварства?

Люди, друзья! Братья и сестры! Дамы и господа! Остановитесь, задумайтесь, опомнитесь.

ЦИВИЛИЗАЦИЯ В ОПАСНОСТИ [183—84].”
― Анатолий Кузнецов, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel

“Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Rand, Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury foresaw much of today’s dystopian world: its spiritual and moral emptiness, its culture of consumerism, its flat-souled Last Manishness, its debasement of language, its doublethink, its illiteracy, and its bovine tolerance of authoritarian indignities. But they did not foresee the most serious and catastrophic of today’s problems: the eminent destruction of whites, and western culture.

None of them thought to deal with race at all. Why is this? Probably for the simple reason that it never occurred to any of them that whites might take slave morality so far as to actually will their own destruction. As always, the truth is stranger than fiction.”
― Jef Costello

“Still, I did a double take when I saw the following headline in the Provincetown Banner: PLOVERS CLOSE PARKING LOT. An image flashed through my mind of little birds dragging a chain across the entrance and waving away traffic. I thought it was the silliest thing I had ever seen until I turned the page and read DOG FECES CLOSES BEACHES.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Истинный источник конфликтов Бубер описывает очень просто: «Первопричина любого конфликта между мною и мои­ми ближними заключается в том, что я не говорю того, что ду­маю, и не делаю того, что говорю» [...]. В результате этого возникает недоверие. Тот, кто в об­щении с ближними следует лишь собственным властным инте­ресам, кто ведет только тактический диалог — с целью осуществления собственных притязаний, тот не может ожидать доверия, поскольку сам возбуждает недоверие; недоверие же подрывает всякие настоящие отношения между людьми, всякую попытку примирения [34].”
― Hans-Joachim Werner, Культура примирення: Нова історична свідомість в Україні

“But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be order? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'
'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.”
― Geprge Orwell

“You cannot not see each and every human being as family, and not believe that Adam and Eve never existed.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It takes irrationality to hold, but intelligence to profit from, conflicting beliefs and attitudes.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivious for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – al this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of (203>204) doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Portakal var, limon var, diye çalar çanları St. Clement'in
Nerde benim üç çeyreğim, diye çalar çanları St. Martin'in!
Ödesene şu borcunu,' diye çalar çanları Old Bailey'nin,
'Hele bir zengin olayım,' diye çalar çanları Shoreditch'in.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Sapere e non sapere; credere fermamente di dire verità sacrosante mentre si pronunciavano le menzogne più artefatte; ritenere contemporaneamente valide due opinioni che si annullavano a vicenda; sapendole contraddittorie fra di loro e tuttavia credendo in entrambe, fare uso della logica contro la logica; rinnegare la morale proprio nell'atto di rivendicarla; credere che la democrazia sia impossibile e nello stesso tempo vedere nel Partito l'unico suo garante; dimenticare tutto ciò che era necessario dimenticare ma, all'occorrenza, essere pronti a richiamarlo alla memoria, per poi eventualmente dimenticarlo di nuovo.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984