1984 key quotes

• “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.”
• “In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
• “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.”
• “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
• “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
• “We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
• “Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.”
• “The end was contained in the beginning.”
• “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
• “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
• “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
• “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
• “Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
• “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”
• “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
• “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
• “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
• “To die hating them, that was freedom.”
• “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”