40 Best 1984 Quotes

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. – O'Brien

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. – Party Slogan

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever. – O'Brien

Big Brother is Watching You. – Party Slogan

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

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

Power is not a means; it is an end. – O'Brien

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death. – Winston Smith

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness. – O'Brien

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

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

We are the dead. – Winston Smith

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. – O'Brien

Sanity is not statistical.

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

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. – O'Brien

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

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

The object of power is power. – O'Brien

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

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

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

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies...

The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.

We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. – O'Brien

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. – Winston Smith

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed.

The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.

Being in a minority, even 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 secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world.

The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the lure.

They could not alter your feelings; for that matter, you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to.