The Party’s slogan, and Orwell’s diagnosis of how a state keeps a population by editing the record. He had watched the tactic in Barcelona, in the press at home, and in the loyalist literature of the Soviet Union. The novel is not a prediction that failed because the year 1984 came and went. It is a manual of a temptation that does not need a calendar. A quotationary is a small instrument against it: the wording, the date, the source, left where they can be checked.