“The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possiblity 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.”

“He slowed his pace a little. He was thirty and there was grey in his hair, yet he had a queer feeling that he had only just grown up. It occured to him that he was merely repeating the destiny of every human being. Everyone rebels against the money-code, and everyone sooner or later surrenders. He had kept up his rebellion a little longer than most, that was all. And he had made such a wretched failure of it!”

“But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.”

“He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him thatit was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulatehis thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequencesof every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.”

“So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”

“The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.”