Y si todos los demás aceptaban la mentira que impuso el partido, si todos los testimonios decían lo mismo, entonces la mentira pasaba a la Historia y se convertía en verdad.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

Once could not learn history from architecture any more than once could learn it from books. Statues, inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might throw light upon the past had been systematically altered.

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

... seria praticamente impossível reconstruir a história de todo aquele período, dizer quem lutava contra quem neste ou naquele dado momento, pois não havia registros escritos e os relatos orais jamais se referiam a algum quadro político diferente do vigente.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wildflowers... the red buses, the blue policemen -- all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

The Russians Communists persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition has done. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity.