“April the 4th, 1984.
To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings! ”
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.”
“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
“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”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Winston: "Does Big Brother exist?"
O'Brien: "Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.""
Winston: "Does he exist like you or me?"
O'Brien: "You do not exist.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Big Brother is Watching You.”
“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 what 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.”
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
O'Brien: “You are a slow learner, Winston."
Winston: "How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
O'Brien: "Sometimes, Winston. 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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“Sanity is not statistical.”
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull. ”
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
"War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.”
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“To die hating them, that was freedom.”
“You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”
“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.”
“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?”
“If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”
“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.”
“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”
"Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.”
“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.”
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
“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 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.”
“He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.
'White to play and mate in two moves.'
Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.”
“The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.”
“Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”
“She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.”
“The end was contained in the beginning.”
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”
“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.”
"He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom."
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”
“Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.”
“When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”
“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.”
“Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.”
“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”
“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.”
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
“If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.”
“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”
“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
“...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”
“It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”
“But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings! ”
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.”
“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
“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”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Winston: "Does Big Brother exist?"
O'Brien: "Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.""
Winston: "Does he exist like you or me?"
O'Brien: "You do not exist.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Big Brother is Watching You.”
“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 what 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.”
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
O'Brien: “You are a slow learner, Winston."
Winston: "How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
O'Brien: "Sometimes, Winston. 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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“Sanity is not statistical.”
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull. ”
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
"War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.”
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“To die hating them, that was freedom.”
“You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”
“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.”
“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?”
“If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”
“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.”
“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”
"Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.”
“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.”
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
“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 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.”
“He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.
'White to play and mate in two moves.'
Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.”
“The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.”
“Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”
“She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.”
“The end was contained in the beginning.”
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”
“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.”
"He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom."
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”
“Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.”
“When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”
“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.”
“Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.”
“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”
“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.”
“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
“If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.”
“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”
“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
“...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”
“It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”
“But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
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