Al’s Reviews > 1984 > Status Update

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”
“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. [...]”

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.

If human equality is to be for ever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

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

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listento him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.