George Orwell

1984 Quotes To Feel Inspired By George Orwell

George Orwell has a lot to say in this book. Check it out!
George Orwell
1984 Quotes To Feel Inspired By George Orwell

60 Of The Best 1984 Quotes

George Orwell is the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, which has also been published as: 1984. This book was published in 1949, so it is based on an imagined future. It has become a clear example of political and dystopian fiction. Orwell's depiction of a totalitarian government and the use of media manipulation and advanced technology to control people is explained in his book. The main character is Winston Smith, who lives in a fictional London in Oceania. Here, "Big Brother" is in control and citizens live in a repressive society. Smith and Julia, who he falls in love with, try to rebel against this oppressive government.

Many people believe there is a parallelism between the society that Orwell describes in his book and current society, in which information is manipulated and political and social repression exists. This is also called the Orwellian society. 

This is a 'must' reading, but if you're not sure about starting to read it or you want to remember some of Orwell's best quotes from 1984, read this article and enjoy!

1“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

2“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

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

4“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

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

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

7“Big Brother is Watching You.”

8“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”

9“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”

10“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”

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

12“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

13“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”

14“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.”

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

16“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

17“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”

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

19"Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain."

20“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.”

21“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

22“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”

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

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

25“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

26“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

27“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”

28“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

29“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

30“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

31“If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”

32“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.”

33“But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

34“Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.”

35“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”

36“Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so." And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to h

37“But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong. ”

38“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”

39“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

40“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.”

41“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”

42“Sanity is not statistical.”

43“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.”

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

45"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.”

46“Nothing exists except through human consciousness”

47“He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.”

48“It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.”

49“What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.”

50“That is her style of beauty.”

51“At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.”

52“If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.”

53“Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.”

54“For the future. For the unborn.”

55“Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.”

56“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.”

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

58“Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in as in their rectified version”

59“The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.”

60“She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed”