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.”

1984 By George Orwell - 30 Quotes

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

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.”

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

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

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?”

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

19. (Continued

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

23. “Sanity is not statistical.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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.”

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

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

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

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.”

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?”

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.”

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

1984 by George Orwell - 30 Important Lines

Looking for the best quotes from 1984 by George Orwell? Here's our list of the 30 most popular & important lines from this classic.

Understand yourself and those around you.

Similar ideas

Power of belief over evidence

Cognitive Dissonance

The cognitive dissonance theory