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Book One, Chapter 3
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed— if all records told the same tale— then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” is a key line from the novel that is repeated multiple times. It first appeared in Book One, Chapter 3 as Winston considers how the Party manipulates history to suit its needs at any given time while he works at his job at the Ministry of Truth doing just that—rewriting records. He understands that by changing the official accounts of events from the past the Party controls the narrative of history and maintains its position of authority in the present.
Book One, Chapter 4
Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. . . . It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.
While working at the Ministry of Truth rewriting history and making up the news in Book One, Chapter 4, Winston invents the backstory of a fallen soldier to cover up the mention of a person who had been declared an unperson. This moment shows both the cynicism Winston holds toward the work he does and how thoroughly he has internalized Party ideology, because he is able to make up the kind of individual that the Party would most approve of as a hero.
Book One, Chapter 8
Within twenty years at most, he reflected, the huge and simple question ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.
In Book One, Chapter 8, Winston attempts to learn about life before the Revolution by talking to an old man in a prole bar, but the man isn’t able to remember anything substantive, or he is afraid to answer the questions of a stranger who could be a Party informant. Winston realizes that due to the unreliability of individual memory, the influence of propaganda, and most of all the deaths of people who remembered life before the Revolution, the Party can succeed in exerting its control over the past.
What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.
Later in Book One, Chapter 8, Winston purchases an antique paperweight from Mr. Charrington’s shop. By doing so, he makes a connection to a part of history that the Party does not recognize to be valid and forms a tactile and visible connection to a world before the Party was in it. He is also skirting illegal behavior by owning something aesthetically pleasing and without a clear use.
Book Two, Chapter 9
[T]he Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising.
This section from Goldstein’s manifesto that Winston reads in Book Two, Chapter 9, explains why the Party’s maxim “Who controls the past controls the future” holds true. If people had a set of standards and norms to hold the Party against, Orwell implies, its authority would collapse.
