Best Quotes from 1984 by George Orwell with Page Numbers

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

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.

He was already uncertain whether it had happened.

It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy.

But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

It was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone.

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory.

What is done cannot be undone.

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

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

It was as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him.

It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding.

There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive.

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship.

Such things, he saw, could not happen today.

He awoke with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.

The frightening thing was that it might all be true.

Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.

The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed.

Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with.

Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work.

Every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct.

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.

Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world.

Very likely no boots had been produced at all.

Winston decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse the tendency of Big Brother's speech.

Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy.

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.

Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past.

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

‘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.'

‘Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'

‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'

‘Freedom is slavery.'

‘The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now.'

‘There is a word in Newspeak, duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings.'

‘The proles are not human beings.'

‘You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston.'

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.

He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back... That poor devil is done for.

The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control.

The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party members.

The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.

He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen... but nevertheless alluring.

The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.

Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation.

The rigidity of her muscles managed to convey that impression.

Even to have awakened Katharine, if he could have achieved it, would have been like a seduction.

If there is hope, it lies in the proles.

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

The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage.

Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes.

Proles and animals are free.

Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve.

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

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

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

If there is hope, it lies in the proles.

But if there was hope, it lay in the proles.

On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London.

There seemed to possess some kind of instinct which told them several seconds in advance when a rocket was coming.

They were talking about the Lottery.

The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention.

It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.

When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.

His heart seemed to turn to ice and his bowels to water.

It was in the moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body.

I love you.

It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.

The desire to stay alive had welled up in him...

It was a physical problem that had to be solved: how to get in touch with the girl and arrange a meeting.

The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute.

Well, it was still better than the expression of a common animal.

She need not have told him that.

He felt as though a fire were burning in his belly.

Winston knew they were there but he saw them only intermittently.

They were shoulder to shoulder, both staring fixedly in front of them.

'In the ragged hedge on the opposite side the boughs of the elm trees swayed just perceptibly in the breeze, and their leaves stirred faintly in dense masses like women's hair.'

'The sweetness of the air and the greenness of the leaves daunted him.'

'I couldn't care less,' said the girl.

'There's no hurry. We've got the whole afternoon.'

'What is your name?' said Winston. 'Julia. I know yours. It's Winston-Winston Smith.'

'Isn't this a splendid hide-out? I found it when I got lost once on a community hike.'

'You thought I was a good Party member. Pure in word and deed.'

'I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere.'

'The more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?'

'I adore it.'

Never go home the same way as you went out.

The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything.

If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate?

The individual is always defeated.

We are the dead.

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?

Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

Only because I prefer a positive to a negative.

We're not dead yet.

Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.

It was a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously.

It’s sure to be full of bugs, but who cares?

It's a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter.

One can't tell. It's impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.

She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to.

He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it.

In this room I'm going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.

They say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget.

What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar.

'If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there.'

'I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself.'

'The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.'

'After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains.'

'I can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there-small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing.'

'It's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.'

'One can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there-small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing.'

'You're only a rebel from the waist downwards.'

'I’m interested in us.'

'She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed.

'I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,' he said.

'You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I believe?'

'But you write it very elegantly,' said O'Brien.

'The tenth edition is not due to appear for some months, I believe. But a few advance copies have been circulated.'

'Some of the new developments are most ingenious. The reduction in the number of verbs—that is the point that will appeal to you, I think.'

'Wait. Let me give you my address.'

'If you ever want to see me, this is where I can be found,' was what O'Brien had been saying to him.

The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.

He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions.

The end was contained in the beginning.

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

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter.

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account.

The proles are human beings. We are not human.

They can make you say anything - anything - but they can't make you believe it.

The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray one another, although even that can't make the slightest difference.

Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside.

What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.

They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them.

They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort.

We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it.

The Brotherhood exists, but I cannot tell you whether it numbers a hundred members, or ten million. From your personal knowledge you will never be able to say that it numbers even as many as a dozen.

You will have to get used to living without results and without hope.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

Our surgeons can alter people beyond recognition. Sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes we even amputate a limb.

Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

When you are finally caught, you will confess. That is unavoidable.

It might be a thousand years. At present, nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little.

To humanity? To the future?

In the place where there is no darkness.

'Ignorance is Strength.'

'War is Peace.'

'To understand the nature of the present war... it is impossible for it to be decisive.'

'The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.'

'The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.'

'Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.'

'If you cling to the truth even against the whole world, you are not mad.'

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

'In a world where everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat... the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared.'

'Sanity is not statistical.'

If there was hope, it lay in the proles!

The future belonged to the proles.

Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness.

You could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard.

Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come.

You were the dead, theirs was the future.

But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body.

and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

Where there is equality there can be sanity.

The birds sang, the proles sang. The Party did not sing.

Everything comes back to his sick body, which shrank trembling from the smallest pain.

In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes.

He thought: 'If I could save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would.'

The pain in his belly had revived.

His mind sagged round and round on the same trick, like a ball falling again and again into the same series of slots.

You have always known it.

It was the place with no darkness.

You could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain.

Time passed.

They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once?

'Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'

'You are no metaphysician, Winston.'

'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four'.

'Thou shalt not.' The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt.' Our command is 'Thou art'.

'We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.'

'No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.'

'It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.'

'You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.'

'Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.'

'Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston.'

"There are three stages in your reintegration," said O'Brien. "There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance."

"The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts."

"Power is not a means; it is an end."

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

"Reality is inside the skull."

"The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual."

"In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy."

"The spirit of Man."

"You can escape from it whenever you choose. Everything depends on yourself."

"I have not betrayed Julia."

'Freedom is slavery.'

'Two and two make five.'

'God is power.'

'The past was alterable. The past never had been altered.'

'Everything was easy, except -!'.

'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.'

'The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.'

'Everything depends on yourself.'

'To die hating them, that was freedom.'

'You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name.'

'The worst thing in the world...varies from individual to individual.'

'For everyone there is something unendurable - something that cannot be contemplated.'

'Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope.'

'It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed.'

'The rat...is carnivorous. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town.'

'Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones.'

'They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.'

'There was one and only one way to save himself - he must interpose another human being.'

'Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her.'

'He was falling backwards, into enormous depths...always away, away, away from the rats.'

They can't get inside you.

What happens to you here is for ever.

There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.

All you care about is yourself.

You don't give a damn what they suffer.

At the time when it happens, you do mean it.

Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet-call preceded the news.

Much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry of Love.

He had won the victory over himself.

It was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.