GEORGE ORWELL 1984 BOOK QUOTES

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”

“Big Brother is watching you.”

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

“Power is not a means; it is an end.”

“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.”

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

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

“The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.”

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

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

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

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

“Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.” REBUILDING A RELATIONSHIP QUOTES

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

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

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

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

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime.”

“Sanity is not statistical.”

“The proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength.”

“If you keep the small rules, you can break the big ones.”

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

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”