Richard Burton: O'Brien

1984

O'Brien

O'Brien: How does one man assert power over another?
Winston Smith: By making him suffer.
O'Brien: Exactly. Obedience is not enough. Power is inflicting pain and humiliation. Otherwise, you cannot be sure. Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

O'Brien: If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.

O'Brien: Smith? I have been reading your Newspeak articles in the Times.
Winston Smith: Yes?
O'Brien: You write it very elegantly. That is not my own opinion - I was recently talking to a friend of yours who is an expert. His name... has slipped my memory for the moment. What I wanted to say is that there were one or two unwords, only very recent. Have you seen the 10th Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?
Winston Smith: No... we're still using the 9th Edition at MinRec.
O'Brien: A few advance copies have been circulated - I have one myself. You might be interested?
Winston Smith: Yes!
O'Brien: There are some plusskillful new developments. Let me give you my address.
[gives Winston a card]
O'Brien: I am usually at home in the evenings. If I am not there, then my servant will give you the Dictionary.

O'Brien: There are thought criminals who maintain that the resistance is not real. Believe me, Winston, it is very real. Perhaps you are not familiar with how it operates.
Winston Smith: I am attentive to the news.
O'Brien: Indeed. Then perhaps you imagine a huge network of conspirators prepared to commit any atrocity to weaken and demoralize the order of our society. The reality is infinitely more subtle. If Goldstein himself fell into the hands of the Thought Police, he could not give them a list of his agents. Such a list does not exist. They are not an organization in the sense we know. Nothing holds it together but an idea. Individually, they cheat, forge, blackmail, corrupt children, spread disease and prostitution, in the name of spreading knowledge from generation to generation, until... in a thousand years...

O'Brien: The past is forbidden. Why? Because when we can cut man from his own past, then we can cut him from his family, his children, other men. There is no loyalty but loyalty to the Party. There is no love except love of Big Brother. All competing pleasures we will destroy.

Winston Smith: I know you'll fail. Something in this world... some spirit you will never overcome...
O'Brien: What is it, this principle?
Winston Smith: I don't know. The spirit of man.
O'Brien: And do you consider yourself a man?
Winston Smith: Yes.
O'Brien: If you're a man, Winston, you're the last man. Your kind is extinct. We are the inheritors. Do you realize that you are alone? You are outside history. You unexist. Get up.
[Winston gets up and O'Brien shows him his reflection in a mirror. Winston is disheveled and beaten]
O'Brien: *That* is the last man. If you are human, *that* is humanity.

O'Brien: In our world, there can only be triumph and self-abasement. Everything else, we will destroy.

O'Brien: Room 101. You asked me once, Winston, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew, already. Everyone knows. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. It goes beyond fear of pain or death. It is unendurable, and it varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive or castration - or many other things. In your case, it is rats.

O'Brien: The Law of Gravity is nonsense. No such law exists. If I think I float, and you think I float, then it happens.
Winston Smith: I love you.

Winston Smith: When will you shoot me?
O'Brien: Might take a long time. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. And in the end - we shall shoot you.

Winston Smith: How can I help it? How can I help what I see in front of my eyes? Two and two makes four.
O'Brien: Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five, sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once.

O'Brien: You knew this would happen, Winston. Don't deceive yourself. You've always known it.

O'Brien: Neither the past, nor the present, nor the future exists in its own right. Reality is in the human mind, not in the individual mind - which makes mistakes and soon perishes - but in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.