In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.
The first thing you must realize is that power is collective.
Pueden obligarte a decir cualquier cosa, lo que sea, pero no obligarte a que lo creas.
Tenias que vivir dado por sentado que escuchaban hasta el ultimo sonido que hacias y que, observaban todos tus movimientos.
Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.
War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Ocea- nia never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.
The obvious, the silly and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that!
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
El resultado de predicar doctrinas totalitarias es que debilita el instinto que indica a las personas libres lo que es peligroso y lo que no.
For they knew nothing, absolutely nothing – nothing, nothing, nothing, like the Dadaists.
Literature is an attempt to influence one’s contemporaries through the recording of experience.
There are two kinds of avaricious person – the bold, grasping type who will ruin you if he can, but who never looks twice at twopence, and the petty miser who has not the enterprise actually to MAKE money, but who will always, as the saying goes, take a farthing from a dunghill with his teeth.
The fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake, rolled across the mat. How small, thought Winston, how small it always was!
She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths.
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance. – George Orwell.
Folly, folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly!
The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed – would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper – the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.
It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak – “child hero” was the phrase generally used – had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police.