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Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness,
Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body.
seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,’
They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
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.
peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
Inequality was the price of civilisation.
The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
‘Sanity is not statistical,’
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,”
Power is not a means, it is an end.
