Dominique Wiegman (1984 - Book #1 Chapter #7)

A few agents of
the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and
marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of
becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the
ideology of the Party.

About five years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling
a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his
desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped
in among the others and then forgotten.

The
successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with
their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the
stall-keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.

After confessing to these things
they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in
fact sinecures but which sounded important.

There would be mention of the bishops
in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks,
the treadmill, the cat-o’-nine tails, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, and the practice
of kissing the Pope’s toe.

With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that
he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

But this was concrete evidence;
it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the
wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.

There would be mention of the bishops
in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks,
the treadmill, the cat-o’-nine tails, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, and the practice
of kissing the Pope’s toe.

The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Not merely the validity
of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by
their philosophy.