Book of Quotes

1984

1984 by George Orwell

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

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

- "War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength."

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

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

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

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

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

- "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

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

- "Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."

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

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

- "Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. 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. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. 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. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me."

- "In the face of pain there are no heroes."

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

- "Big Brother is Watching You."

- "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

- "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."

- "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."

- "I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane."

- "Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else."

- "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? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"