“The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the sametime it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity tochoose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that heshould constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguishgood and evil - and at the same time spoke pathetically of guilt andtreachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, awheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and couldnot be stopped or influenced - and the Party demanded that the wheelshould revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There wassomewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.”

“For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings of her course. Her course had many twists and windings; such was the law of her being. And whosoever could not follow her crooked course was washed on to the bank, for such was her law. The motives of the individual did not matter to her. His conscience did not matter to her, neither did she care what went on in his head and his heart. The Party knew only one crime: to swerve from the course laid out; and only one punishment: death. Death was no mystery in the movement; there was nothing exalted about it: it was the logical solution to political divergences”

“For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on theearth. The Party had taught one how to do it. The infinite was apolitically suspect quantity, the `I' a suspect quality. The Party did notrecognize its existence. The definition of an individual was: a multitudeof one million divided by one million.”

“Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space.”

“I don't approve of mixing ideologies," Ivanov continued. "There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community--which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.”

“Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”

“Hitherto man had to live with the idea of death as an individual; from now onward mankind will have to live with the idea of its death as a species.”