Orwell Quotes

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Big Brother is watching you.

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Until they became conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world view.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

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

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been against totalitarianism.

The object of power is power.

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

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves, and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.

We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

It is a power thing; the less you understand, the more you will listen.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

The only discipline that lasts is self-discipline.

I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Sanity is not statistical.

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

Power is not a means; it is an end.

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

If there is hope, it lies in the proles.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.

He loved Big Brother.