17 Powerful Quotes From Orwell's 1984 That Still Resonate Today
67 years after its publication, George Orwell's masterpiece “1984” is still very relevant. This famous dystopian novel, set in a world beyond our imagining, was telling a story of a totalitarian regime in which all power was split into three roughly equal groups: Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania. Some say it is way too dark even for a dystopia and does not really represent how things are in our modern world, but some argue that it resonates now more than ever. Here are 17 quotes from it for you to decide for yourself!
1. “Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
2. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
3. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
4. "How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled."
5. "The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately."
6. “Sanity is not statistical.”
7. "Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
8. “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
9. "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.”
10. "We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
11. "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
12. “Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O'Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O'Brien: You do not exist.”
13. “If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”
14. "If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?”
15. "The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”
16.
“It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. 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 realize 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.”
17.
“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
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