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.
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
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.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
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.
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.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
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.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
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.
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
Sanity is not statistical.
The only good human being is a dead one.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
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?
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
To die hating them, that was freedom.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O'Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O'Brien: You do not exist.
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree.
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
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.
Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?
You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.
The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.
April the 4th, 1984. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man - greetings!
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
All men are enemies. All animals are comrades
Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.
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 round him. She had become a physical necessity.
The end was contained in the beginning.
Power is not a means; it is an end.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable
The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.
If there is hope, it lies in the proles.
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
