What happens to you here is forever.
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me –.
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O’Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O’Brien: You do not exist.
But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.
There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.
The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.
We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.
What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.
I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on – that is, badly.
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.