"Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?"
— Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)

"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
— George Orwell (Animal Farm: A Fairy Story)

"Nut jobs are exactly the kind of people who will have survived.People who saw Big Brother when he wasn't there. People who suspected the rest of
humanity before the rest of humanity turned dangerous."
— Stephenie Meyer (The Host)

"Nut jobs are exactly the kind of people who will have survived.People who saw Big Brother when he wasn't there. People who suspected the rest of
humanity before the rest of humanity turned dangerous."
— Stephenie Meyer (The Host)

"The greatest guilt of today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one's eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: "But I didn't mean this!"
— Ayn Rand

"Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?"
— Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)

"Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom."
— George Orwell (1984)

"I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing….
I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith"
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

""Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.""
— Jacques Ellul

"A baby almost killed me as I walked to work one morning. By passing beneath a bus shelter's roof at the ordained moment I lived to tell my tale. With strangers surrounding me I looked at what remained. Laoughter from heaven made us lift our eyes skyward. The baby's mother lowered her arms and leaned out her window. Without applause her audience drifted off, seeking crumbs in the gutters of this city of God. Xerox shingles covered the shelter's remaining glass pane, and the largest read:

Want to be crucified. Have own nails.
Leave message on machine.

The fringe of numbers along the ad's hem had been stripped away. My shoes crunched glass underfoot; my skirt clung to my legs as I continued down the street. November dawn's seventy-degree bath made my hair lose its set. Mother above appeared ready to take her own bow; I too, as ever, flew on alone. "
— Jack Womack (Heathern)

"To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war.

(The Machine Stops)"
— E.M. Forster