1984 - George Orwell

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

The end was contained in the beginning.

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed.
Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story.
But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction.
It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order..
It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden.
The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

"How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?"
"Four."
"And if the party says that it is not four but five--then how many?"

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

'By itself,' he said, 'pain is not always enough.
There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death.
But for everyone there is something unendurable--something that cannot be contemplated.
Courage and cowardice are not involved.
If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope.
If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air.
It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed.

Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.