(an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.)
30 years ago, I would have called that a tinfoil, nut-job conspiracy theory.
These days......🤔🤔🤔
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
George Orwell, 1984
Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
George Orwell, 1984
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.
George Orwell, 1984
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Sign up
My Books
Browse ▾
Community ▾
Join Goodreads
and meet your next favorite book!
Sign Up Now
1984 Quotes
1984 by George Orwell
1984
by George Orwell
Want to Read
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: truth
Like Likes: 15397
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: inspirational
Like Likes: 10292
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: freedom, ignorance, inspirational, war
Like Likes: 6846
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: books, reading
Like Likes: 4157
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: secrets
Like Likes: 3343
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: language, power-of-words, propaganda, thought
Like Likes: 2739
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: future
Like Likes: 2648
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 2578
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: april, dystopia, first-sentence, opening-lines
Like Likes: 2540
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 2269
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: conscious, rebel
Like Likes: 1963
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: power
Like Likes: 1918
If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 1679
In the face of pain there are no heroes.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: 1984
Like Likes: 1671
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 1661
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 1567
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: truth
Like Likes: 1509
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: 1984, human, intellectual, mind, reality
Like Likes: 1490
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: political
Like Likes: 1421
Big Brother is Watching You.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 1316
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: absurd
Like Likes: 1304
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: 1984
Like Likes: 1194
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: 1984, nineteen-eighty-four
Like Likes: 1181
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?
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: ethics, logic, metaphysics, ontology, philosophy, psychology, science
Like Likes: 1160
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 892
Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: orthodoxy
Like Likes: 856
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: enemies
Like Likes: 783
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: 1984, future, history, past, present
Like Likes: 729
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: betrayal, confession, love
Like Likes: 726
Sanity is not statistical.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 720
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 682
To die hating them, that was freedom.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: die, freedom, hate
Like Likes: 638
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: abuse, abuse-survivors, agony, agony-of-torture, chronic-pain, pain, torture
Like Likes: 569
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?
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: oppression, power, terrorism, torture
Like Likes: 531
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: dictatorship
Like Likes: 522
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 478
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: power
Like Likes: 470
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: 1984, george-orwell, politics, socialism, totalitarianism
Like Likes: 452
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 449
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: dystopia
Like Likes: 443
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 433
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: 1984, big-brother, george, george-orwell, government, orwell
Like Likes: 429
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: dystopia, fear-of-the-future, inequality, poverty, society
Like Likes: 387
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 370
الولاء يعني انعدام التفكير، بل انعدام الحاجة للتفكير، الولاء هو عدم الوعي.
جورج أورويل, 1984
Like Likes: 370
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: revolutionary
Like Likes: 353
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: 1984
Like Likes: 339
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?
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 339
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
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: contradiction, doublethink, hypocrisy
Like Likes: 337
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 334
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: power, realism, truth
Like Likes: 303
إننا ندرك أنه ما من أحد يمسك بزمام السلطة وهو ينتوي التخلي عنها.
إن السلطة ليست وسيلة بل غاية، فالمرء لا يقيم حكما استبداديا لحماية الثورة، وإنما يشعل الثورة لإقامة حكم استبدادي.
إن الهدف من الاضطهاد هو الاضطهاد، والهدف من التعذيب هو التعذيب وغاية السلطة هي السلطة، هل بدأت تفهم ما أقول الآن ؟
جورج أورويل, 1984
Like Likes: 293
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 255
The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
George Orwell, 1984
Tags: inspirational, life
Like Likes: 246
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 245
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!
George Orwell, 1984
Like Likes: 235
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.
George Orwell, 1984
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
George Orwell, 1984