40 Quotes from 1984 by George Orwell

Published July 27, 2025, 9:28 p.m. by james

  1. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
  2. Big Brother is watching you.
  3. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
  4. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
  5. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
  6. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
  7. The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
  8. Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.
  9. Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
  10. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
  11. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
  12. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
  13. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
  14. The object of power is power.
  15. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
  16. To die hating them, that was freedom.
  17. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
  18. If there is hope, it lies in the proles.
  19. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
  20. They can’t get inside you... But they could get inside you.
  21. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
  22. Sanity is not statistical.
  23. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
  24. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
  25. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.
  26. If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
  27. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship.
  28. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
  29. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort.
  30. It was a political act.
  31. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape.
  32. Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.
  33. If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.
  34. He who controls the image controls the mind.
  35. It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.
  36. The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
  37. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.
  38. A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police.
  39. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
  40. He loved Big Brother.

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