1984 - George Orwell

Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could only wish for one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had welled up in him...

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference.
They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

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

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

When war becomes continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

The heresy of heresies was common sense.
And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.
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?

Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.
Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally.
And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself.

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

Power is not a means, it is an end.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
The object of persecution is persecution.
The object of torture is torture.
The object of power is power.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.