1984 quotes

"War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength." 1984 - by George Orwell

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." 1984 - by George Orwell

"How do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?" 1984 - by George Orwell

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power – pure power." 1984 - by George Orwell

"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." O'Brian to Winston, 1984 - by George Orwell

"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." 1984 - by George Orwell

"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." 1984 - by George Orwell

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." 1984 - by George Orwell

"The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better." 1984 - by George Orwell

"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad." 1984 - by George Orwell

"The best books… are those that tell you what you know already." 1984 - by George Orwell

"What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?" 1984 - by George Orwell

"Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else." 1984 - by George Orwell

"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth." 1984 - by George Orwell

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right." 1984

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" 1984

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." 1984

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. . . . Power is not a means; it is an end . . . not power over things, but over men. . . . In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. . . . There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. . . . Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." 1984

"Big Brother is watching you." 1984

"A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer." George Orwell

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." George Orwell