1984 Winston Quotes

The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed – would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper – the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

– George Orwell

1984. Part 1, Chapter 1. When Winston Smith sets out to challenge the Party’s power, he discovers the real extend of its ability to control and enslave people . In this society thoughts are not free.

Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

– George Orwell

1984. Part 1, Chapter 4. Winston’s thoughts as he invents the fictitious war hero Comrade Ogilvy, while ‘rectifying’ historical documents at the Ministry of Truth. His job is to falsify the past to accord with the Party’s latest version of reality. A written example of ‘doublethink’.

In the Party histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties.

– George Orwell

1984. Part 1, Chapter 3. Does Big Brother actually exist? There may have been such a person, but Winston knows that the stories told about Big Brother change and become embellished over time. To the Party and the population, his symbolic meaning the important thing.

With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.

– George Orwell

1984. Part 1, Chapter 3. Winston dreams about the ‘Golden Country’ where a dark-haired woman comes from across the field, and with one movement, flings off her clothes in a disdainful gesture. He is overwhelmed with admiration for the gesture.

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence.

– George Orwell

1984. Part 1, Chapter 5. Winston has a moment of fear as he realizes he is being watched.

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

1984. Part 1, Chapter 7. The thoughts of Winston, who works for the Ministry of Truth, where he alters the historical record to match the Party’s propaganda. Welcome to the world of official deception, surveillance, and manipulation of history by a totalitarian state.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

– George Orwell

1984. Part 1, Chapter 7. Winston. Orwell got inspiration from a real event in Russia where the community party celebrated achieving a production goal in four years instead of five by announcing the workers had made 2+2=5.
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