When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.

It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.