1984 Quotes

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

“He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable”

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.”

“The end was contained in the beginning.”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink”

“Sanity is not statistical.”

“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”

“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”