Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air.
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know,
to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,
to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory
and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while
laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian
of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory
again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all,
to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously
to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis
you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.