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coti

(4,612 posts)
Wed Jul 18, 2018, 03:56 PM Jul 2018

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and

accepting both of them."

“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.”

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”

“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

- George Orwell, 1984

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/153313-nineteen-eighty-four

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"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and (Original Post) coti Jul 2018 OP
Kick nt coti Jul 2018 #1
KnR and a sad toast to the very sane ghost of George Orwell Hekate Jul 2018 #2
Cheers nt coti Jul 2018 #3
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