A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

No one is patriotic about taxes.

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

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 % of the population exist.

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the party was trying to achieve.