"WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." (The three party slogans that are so blatantly hypocritical I cringe every time I read them with some kind of morbid fascination.)' - "Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever." (Reminds me of Anthem in many respects, "It is a sin to write this" being the opening lines. Winston opens a diary, which is a similar situation.) - "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." (Always an interesting take on the Party's complete and utter subjectivism.) - "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." (Except the Party defeats logic in a horrific way.) - "The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc." (As always, evil is anti-human; therefore, anti-reason.) - "There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad." "Sanity is not statistical." (I love that last one. No matter how many people deny that two and two make five, they always do.) - "'The command of the old despotisms was Thou Shalt Not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou Shalt. Our command is Thou Art.'" (Gives me the creeps. What if the Party could actually get in anyone's head? There's a point where anyone breaks, even John Galt... OK, maybe not John Galt.) - "'The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.'" (Reminds me much of power-hungry Ellsworth Toohey.) - "'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.'" (Again, so creepy to think that the object of evil is simple destruction of productivity and individual thinking.) - "To die hating them, that was freedom." (Jeez, hate to point out the totally depressing ending.) I feel like this book is often discredited because Orwell was actually a socialist. If you look beyond that at the simple messages of the book, at a fundamental level he is just a misguided Objectivist. Of course, a much less uplifting book, but much more psychological and disturbing. And to be perfectly honest, I think Orwell is a superior writer to Rand in conveying a more thematic environment and deeper characters. Then again, as always, Rand is a Romantic, so her characters are perfect and on-the-surface, whereas Winston and Julia are dismal and inevitably fall to the all-powerful Party and ruthless O'Brien, who fascinates me the most.