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"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it ... Each step was so small, so inconsequential ... one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."

" Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. ... You don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’"

"And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. "Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows."

"And you ARE alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end"

"On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have."

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work" "you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence and serves as a further deterrent to—to what?"

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty."

"In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."