1984 Important Quotes

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existance, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.

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

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

He who controls the past controls the future.

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

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.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

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

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

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

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

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

Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.

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

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

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children

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

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

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?

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

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

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.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.