Quotes from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“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, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“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, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“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, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“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, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“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, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“The fruit of the Spirit is not spouse control or staff control or environmental control; it is self-control (see Gal. 5:23).”
― Neil T. Anderson, quote from Victory Over the Darkness

“I want for people not to worry so much. Life ain't going to be perfect, but tings will work out. People come to visit and I always tell them not to worry. If you got something to eat, don't worry, be grateful. Just look at all those books. Those books aren't about food. They're to do with worrying about food.”
― quote from Life is So Good

“A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “class struggle”.

What I am saying concerning mysticism, gnosis, magic and philosophy would be considered by him only as a ruse on the part of the bourgeois class, with the aim of “screening with a mystical and idealistic haze” the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie…although I have not inherited anything from my parents and I have not experienced a single day without having to earn my living by means of work recognised as “legitimate” by Marxists!

Another contemporary example of possession by a system is Freudianism. A man possessed by this system will see in everything that I have written only the expression of “suppressed libido”, which seeks and finds release in this manner. It would therefore be the lack of sexual fulfillment which has driven me to occupy myself with the Tarot and to write about it!
Is there any need for further examples? Is it still necessary to cite the Hegelians with their distortion of the history of humanity, the Scholastic “realists” of the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, the rationalists of the eighteenth century who were blinded by the light of their own autonomous reasoning?

Yes, autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.”
― quote from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism

“But words spoken can never be taken back. They can only be measured for and judged on the strength of their sincerity and need.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from The Gypsy Morph

“If there's anything I hate, it's someone telling me "don't" without saying why.”
― Shelley Adina, quote from Lady of Devices

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.