1984

They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.

If human equality is to be for ever averted --if the High, as we have called them,are to keep their places permanently --then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.

Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same.

In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, andglittering -- a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons -- a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting --three hundred
million people all with the same face.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they haverebelled they cannot become conscious.

Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?