"But the world itself is tiny-helpless. How long has it been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited".
"Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness".
"But the rocks are full of bones of extinct animals-mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of".
"Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth biologist invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing".
"But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light years away. They are out of our reach forever".
"What are the stars?" said O'Brien indifferently. They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go around it."
"For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or we predict and eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes around the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?"
"The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self abasement. Everything else we shall destroy-everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from hens."