Memorable Quotes from 1984

Big Brother is watching you.

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

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

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

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

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

Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

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

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

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.

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

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

Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

Memorable Quotes from 1984 part 2

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.

In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.

You are a slow learner, Winston.

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

Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death; thoughtcrime is death.

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

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they had rebelled they cannot become conscious.

To die hating them, that was freedom.

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

Do you realise that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished?

Sanity is not statistical.

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

Proles and animals are free.

You are a slow learner, Winston.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.

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 consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

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

Being in a minority, even 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.

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.

The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself.

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

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

Thought crime does not entail death: thought crime is death.