1984 Book Cover

1984

Book By: George Orwell
Publishing Year: 1949

What’s inside

Published in 1949, 1984 is the last book by Orwell before his death. The term "Orwellian" has come to describe actions or organizations reminiscent of the totalitarian society depicted throughout the novel. The novel is set in a dystopian future, where the world is divided into three nations that...

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1984 Quotes

37 of the best quotes from 1984 Book

  1. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
  2. - George Orwell
  3. The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
  4. - George Orwell
  5. 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.
  6. - George Orwell
  7. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.
  8. - George Orwell
  9. 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
  10. - George Orwell
  11. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
  12. - George Orwell
  13. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
  14. - George Orwell
  15. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
  16. - George Orwell
  17. 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.
  18. - George Orwell
  19. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
  20. - George Orwell
  21. It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
  22. - George Orwell
  23. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
  24. - George Orwell
  25. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
  26. - George Orwell
  27. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.
  28. - George Orwell
  29. The end was contained in the beginning.
  30. - George Orwell
  31. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
  32. - George Orwell
  33. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
  34. - George Orwell
  35. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
  36. - George Orwell
  37. If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
  38. - George Orwell
  39. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
  40. - George Orwell
  41. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
  42. - George Orwell
  43. Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
  44. - George Orwell
  45. 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.
  46. - George Orwell
  47. The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
  48. - George Orwell
  49. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
  50. - George Orwell
  51. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
  52. - George Orwell
  53. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
  54. - George Orwell
  55. Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
  56. - George Orwell
  57. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink
  58. - George Orwell
  59. Sanity is not statistical.
  60. - George Orwell
  61. Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
  62. - George Orwell
  63. Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
  64. - George Orwell
  65. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.
  66. - George Orwell
  67. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
  68. - George Orwell
  69. To die hating them, that was freedom.
  70. - George Orwell
  71. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
  72. - George Orwell
  73. 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?
  74. - George Orwell