I have no wish to take life, not even human life

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.

You were the dead; theirs was the future.

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.