1984 Quotes: The 30 Best & Most Important Lines From George Orwell's Masterpiece

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. “It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.”

13. “It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.”  

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

15. “But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.”

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

17. “When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”  

18. “To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”  

19. “Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. 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. (Continues next slide)

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.”

20 . “The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”

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

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

23. “Sanity is not statistical.”  

24. “Where there is equality, there can be sanity.”  

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

26. “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?”  

27. “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever… And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon.”

28. “Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.”

29. “‘If he THINKS he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously THINK I see him do it, then the thing happens. … It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ … What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.”  

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