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“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.
If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.
The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” Winston thought. “By making him suffer,”
Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth,
