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.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
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?
'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'
Winston thought.
'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer.
Obedience is not enough.
Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?
Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.'
It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty.
It would never endure.
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone--to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink--greetings!