Doublethink

[1938]  George Orwell,  Homage to Catalonia, with Looking back on the Spanish War, Penguin, Harmondwsorth, 1983

-  "Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed by decree; there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back .... The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive." (p. 480)

[1945]  Arthur Koestler,  The Yogi and the Commissar, Jonathan Cape, London, 1964

-  "The Byzantine structure of the Comintern reflected the structure of the Soviet dictatorship; the Communist approach to the workers and the intelligentsia of Europe was modelled on the Russian way of handling a semi-asiatic and practically illiterate population, and applied with total disregard of Western conditions and mentality." (p. 131)
-  "Constant purges, the monotonously recurrent excommunication of the popular leaders of yesterday, the absence of any rank-and-file influence on the party-line, the sacrifice of thousands in hopeless adventures alternating with capitulations to and alliances with the enemy; the twisting around of slogans to mean the exact opposite of what the words conveyed, indignant denials of the truth of yesterday, an atmosphere of slander, denunciations and Byzantine worship - how can it be explained that millions in the West swallowed all this, and swallowed it voluntarily, in self-imposed discipline, with no Gestapo or G.P.U. to back it up?" (p. 131)

-  "As the gulf between Soviet myth and reality widened, the dialectical curvature in the believer's mind increased, until he found it quite natural to see Ribbentrop decorated with the order of Lenin, to call a millionaire a proletarian and a table a duckpond." (p. 132)

-  "Acts like the hoisting of the Swastika on the Moscow airfield for Ribbentrop's reception, and the playing of the Nazi anthem by the Red Army band - such symbolic acts may be passed over  as cynical opportunism if committed by capitalist countries, but have a different effect if committed by the Fatherland  of the Workers and Peasants." (p. 151)

[1948]  George Orwell,  Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999

-  "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity." (pp. 220-221)

-  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 contradictions 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. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by a system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink." (p. 221)

-  "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. 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." (p. 223)

-  "... if the High [i.e. those in power], as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity." (p. 225)

[1957]  Ayn Rand,  Atlas Shrugged, Signet Books, New York, 1957

-  "We must not see the world as they want us to see it. It's some sort of fraud, very ancient and very vast - and the key to break it is : to check every premise they teach us, to question every precept ..." (p. 357)