These books can be read, independently of their time and place, as a strong preventive medicine against the mentality of servility, and especially against the lethal temptation to exchange freedom for security: a bargain that invariably ends up with the surrender of both.
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.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
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.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership.
“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.
The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”