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The Ministry of Truth—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten.
Hardly a week passed in which the Times (newspaper)did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—“child hero” was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police. The family could not actually be abolished [but] children were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report deviations. The family had become in effect an extention of the Thought Police.
"Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past."
[A member of the Party said], "We're destroying words, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.
The heresy of heresies was common sense.
With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien (traitor), and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he (Winston) wrote: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960.
In the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and then film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television...private life came to an end.
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O'Brian asked Winston, "How does one man assert his power over another?"
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 inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is tearing human minds into pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see then, what kind of world we are creating?