It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.
For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.
Though it is unreal it is not meaningless.
The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.
There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoid- able order of things.
He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, than a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.
Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:.
Most people want to be good, but not that good and not all the time.
All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ’controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.
I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating.
Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite.
The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understangin, the greater the delusion; the more intelligente, the less sane.
No one I met at this time – doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients – failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
We are the dead.
It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.