George Orwell 1984 Quotes – Insight into dystopian society and totalitarian control

Big Brother is watching you.

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

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

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sanity is not statistical.

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Big Brother can manipulate the past by controlling the present.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

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?

George Orwell 1984 Quotes – Insight into dystopian society and totalitarian control 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.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

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

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

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.

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

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

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

The past is rotting in every grimy street corner, the future is there in the place where the able workers live.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them.

Control the past and you control the future. Control the present and you control the past.

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

He who controls the present controls the past.

A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph.

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.

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

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

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

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

The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all around him.

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.

We control matter because we control the mind.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

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

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

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

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