1984 Quotes

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

Chapter number : 3 Page number : 252
11402

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

Chapter number : 1 Page number : 1
2088

Big Brother is Watching You.

Chapter number : 1 Page number : 3
1014

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 that 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.

1245

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

1176

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.

1004

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?

683

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

653

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

595

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

565

You are a slow learner, Winston.""How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.""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.

543

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.

497

Sanity is not statistical.

495

To die hating them, that was freedom.

387

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.

379

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

371

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

338

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

334

الولاء يعني إنعدام التفكير , بل إنعدام الحاجة للتفكير , الولاء هو عدم الوعي

333

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.

310

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

302

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O'Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O'Brien: You do not exist.

299

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.

278

إننا ندرك أنه ما من أحد يمسك بزمام السلطة وهو ينتوي التخلي عنها.إن السلطة ليست وسيلة بل غاية , فالمرء لا يقيم حكما أستبداديا لحماية الثورة , وإنما يشعل الثورة لإقامة حكم استبدادي.إن الهدف من الأضطهاد هو الأضطهاد, والهدف من التعذيب هو التعذيب وغاية السلطة هي السلطة, هل بدأت تفهم ما أقول الآن ؟

265

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

258

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:There lie they, and here lie weUnder the spreading chestnut tree.

256

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?

254

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

250

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.

239

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.

233

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

220

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

209

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

192

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.

186

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

177

You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.

175

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

172

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.

172

April the 4th, 1984. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man - greetings!

166

وإذا استطاع المرء أن يشعر بأن بقاءه أنساناً هو أمر يستحق التضحية من أجله, حتى لو لم يُؤد ذلك إلى نتيجة, فإنه يكون قد ألحق بهم الهزيمة

147

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.

147

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.

143

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

141

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.

140

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.

125

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

124

In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

122

Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

121