1984 Quotes About Surveillance

Big Brother is watching you.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

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

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

You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

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

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

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

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

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

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

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad.

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think.

We are the priests of power.

We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature.

Sanity is not statistical.

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed.

As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable?

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.

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

If there is hope, it lies in the proles.

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.

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

Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality.

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed.

Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was his work.

You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled 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.

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

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

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

Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was his work.

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.

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering—a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons—a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting—three hundred million people all with the same face.

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

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think.

Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?

But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it.

Nothing endures.

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

Sanity is not statistical.