1 The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition.
2 It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously.
3 If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole.
4 The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison.
5 Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three super-states are very much the same.
6 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.
7 And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
8 The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.
9 By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them.
10 If he could get her at a table by herself, somewhere in the middle of the room, not too near the telescreens, and with a sufficient buzz of conversation all round--if these conditions endured for, say, thirty seconds, it might be possible to exchange a few words.
11 And when memory failed and written records were falsified--when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.