Sourced and curated.

It Can't Happen Here · 1935

★ 1.9

Why, America’s the only free nation on earth. Besides! Country’s too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn’t happen here!

It Can't Happen Here · 1935

★ 1.9

There are only four ways in which a ruling class can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.1

By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.1

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face.

The Handmaid's Tale · 1985

★ 2.1

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

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.2

DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.2

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

The Handmaid's Tale · 1985

★ 2.2

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

"If there is hope," he had written in the diary, "it lies in the proles."

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

The Handmaid's Tale · 1985

★ 2.3

Why are you so afraid of the word ‘Fascism,’ Doremus? Just a word-just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours-not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini-like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days-and have ‘em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again. ‘Nother words, have a doctor who won’t take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!

It Can't Happen Here · 1935

★ 3.5

He loved the People just as much as he feared and detested Persons.

It Can't Happen Here · 1935

★ 3.7

It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class.

It Can't Happen Here · 1935

★ 3.7

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

It Can't Happen Here · 1935

★ 3.7

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.8

Being in a minority, even 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.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.8

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

The Handmaid's Tale · 1985

★ 3.8

Novel · Allegory · Dystopian fiction