13 quotes from George Orwell’s 1984 that resonate more than ever
There’s a fair chance you quoted 1984 this week without noticing. Someone calls a policy Orwellian. A colleague mutters about Big Brother when another camera goes up in the car park. A minister is accused of doublethink and nobody stops to ask what the word means, because everybody already knows.
Orwell’s last novel has done the strangest thing a book can do. It has escaped its own covers. Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, doublethink — these arrived in the language in 1949 and simply stayed, like guests who never left after the party.
What almost nobody knows is where the lines actually came from. Room 101 was a meeting room at the BBC. “Two plus two equals five” wasn’t Orwell’s invention at all — it was a Soviet poster slogan. And the man who wrote all of it was dying while he did it, on a Scottish island, typing the manuscript twice because no typist would travel that far.
So here are the quotes. And, for once, where they came from.
The slogans
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Party slogan, carved into the Ministry of Truth
Three lines that shouldn’t work together and somehow do. It is the clearest statement of what Orwell was actually frightened of: not that governments would lie, but that they would say two opposite things at once and dare you to notice.
Big Brother is Watching You.
Poster caption, Part One
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Goldstein’s book
The reason that word survived is that the thing it describes turns out to be extremely common.
Big Brother had two faces
The most recognisable sentence in twentieth-century fiction, and Orwell built the face behind it out of two men. One was Stalin, whose portrait hung in every Soviet public building. The other was Lord Kitchener, whose moustachioed finger jabbed out of British recruitment posters during the First World War above the words Your Country Needs You.
It’s worth sitting with that for a second. The most frightening image in dystopian literature is Soviet surveillance wearing a British army poster’s face. Orwell wasn’t only writing about somewhere else.
The Thought Police came from somewhere just as specific. He modelled them on the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, and took thoughtcrime itself from the Kempeitai, the Japanese wartime police who arrested civilians for holding unpatriotic thoughts. The Two Minutes Hate was based on the short, frenzied pep-talks given to Soviet workers, and Hate Week on the annual October Revolution celebrations.
Almost nothing in Winston’s world was invented. It was collected.
Secrets and the past
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
Party slogan
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Syme, Part One
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Winston’s work at the Ministry of Truth involves rewriting historical records to match the Party’s current narrative. That last line captures the terrifying efficiency of it: once the original record is gone and the alteration is forgotten, the fabrication becomes indistinguishable from fact. In an age where content can be edited, deleted and redistributed at scale, it reads less like fiction and more like a user manual.
Two and two make five was a real slogan
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?
Winston Smith, diary
Here is the fact that reframes the whole novel. “2 + 2 = 5” was genuine Soviet propaganda. It appeared on a 1931 poster by the artist Yakov Guminer, promoting the slogan “Five in Four” — the push to complete the second five-year plan in four years through sheer collective will.
Orwell didn’t dream up the idea that a state might insist on an arithmetical impossibility. He’d watched one do it. When Winston is tortured into seeing five fingers where there are four, that isn’t a flight of fancy. It’s reportage with the serial numbers filed off.
Power
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
O’Brien, Ministry of Love
The line people reach for when they want to sound bleak, and it’s almost always quoted without the thing that makes it worse. O’Brien isn’t threatening Winston. He’s describing a plan he finds rather beautiful.
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.
O’Brien, Part Three
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.
O’Brien, Part Three
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
O’Brien, Part Three
This was Orwell’s real innovation. Every tyranny before this one, in fiction at least, wanted something — land, gold, a master race, the workers’ paradise. The Party wants power, and having got it, wants more of it, and that is the whole of the programme. There is no end state. There’s just the boot, and the face, and forever.
Room 101 was a real room at the BBC
The chamber where prisoners meet the worst thing in the world is widely believed to be named after Conference Room 101 at BBC Broadcasting House, where Orwell sat through wartime committee meetings apparently tedious enough to qualify as torture. The BBC itself has acknowledged the connection; when Broadcasting House was refurbished, an artist made a plaster cast of the room before it was demolished.
He worked at the BBC’s Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943, producing propaganda broadcasts aimed at India. That job gave him rather more than a joke about a meeting room. The Ministry of Truth, where Winston spends his days rewriting the past, was modelled on the BBC. Orwell had personally sat inside the machine that decides what a nation is told, and he never quite got over it.
Language as a weapon
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
Syme, Part One
Orwell understood that language is not merely a tool for communication but a mechanism of control. By reducing vocabulary and eliminating words for dissent, the Party does not simply suppress rebellion — it makes rebellion literally unthinkable. The concept has striking parallels in our modern world, where political euphemism and corporate jargon routinely obscure uncomfortable truths.
The proles
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
Winston Smith, diary
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
Goldstein’s book
Orwell had been a socialist his entire adult life. He named the Party’s ideology Ingsoc — English Socialism — after a phrase from his own 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn, in which he argued that only a socialist transformation could beat Hitler. That isn’t a writer attacking his enemies. That’s a writer taking his own most cherished idea and imagining, in detail, what it would look like if it went bad. There aren’t many novelists willing to do that.
Love as an act of defiance
The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account.
Winston Smith
In a world where every relationship is monitored and personal loyalty is redirected toward the state, the simple act of loving another person becomes revolutionary. Winston and Julia’s affair is not merely romantic — it is political. Orwell suggests that authentic human connection is the one force totalitarianism cannot manufacture or replace, which is precisely why it must be destroyed.
We are the dead.
Winston and Julia, Part Two
Both repeat the phrase, acknowledging that their rebellion is futile on an individual level. Yet they persist. Orwell offers no happy ending and no triumphant revolution. Instead something more complex: the idea that resistance matters even when it fails, and that the human impulse toward freedom cannot be fully extinguished even when the human being can be.
The book that nearly wasn’t
The novel was almost called The Last Man in Europe. Orwell’s publisher, Fredric Warburg, talked him out of it on the grounds that it wouldn’t sell. He settled on Nineteen Eighty-Four, possibly by inverting the last two digits of 1948, the year he finished it. Earlier drafts had been set in 1980, then 1982. Scholars still argue about whether the final date meant anything at all.
He wrote most of it on Jura, in the Inner Hebrides, one of the least accessible inhabited places in Britain — and he had tuberculosis the entire time. He worked in bed, coughing blood, sometimes typing in the cold. He called the final draft “a ghastly mess”.
While he was there, he and his young son were caught in the Corryvreckan whirlpool and nearly drowned, clinging to a rock until a passing fisherman picked them up. He went back to his desk and carried on.
Then, because no professional typist would travel that far, he retyped the entire manuscript himself, propped up in bed. His doctors believed the effort worsened his tuberculosis and shortened his life.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 and sold out almost at once in Britain and America. Orwell died on 21 January 1950, seven months later, aged 46. He never saw a single thing the book would go on to do.
Shirt: Make Orwell Fiction Again, Very Brexit Problems
Why it keeps coming back
Every generation decides 1984 is about them, which is either proof of Orwell’s foresight or proof that people are very good at spotting themselves in a mirror. Probably both.
But the reason it survives isn’t the surveillance, and it certainly isn’t the telescreens, which are the most dated thing in it. It’s the language. Orwell understood that the fastest way to control what people can think is to shrink what they can say — and that a state doesn’t have to convince you two and two make five. It only has to make you unsure.
Which, given the slogan was on posters in Moscow while he was writing, he never had to imagine at all.
If Orwell’s words resonated, see our collection of 14 essential quotes about fascism, 15 timeless observations from history’s greatest dystopian novels, and 10 anti-war novels that will change how you see conflict.
Sources
Room 101 and Broadcasting House: BBC News, “Room 101 immortalised in plaster”, 13 November 2003. “2 + 2 = 5”: poster by Yakov Guminer, 1931, promoting the “Five in Four” campaign of the Soviet second five-year plan. Orwell at the BBC Eastern Service, 1941–43: BBC archive records. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, George Orwell, 1941. Publication date 8 June 1949; Orwell died 21 January 1950.
For more on this theme, see 9 great thinkers on the stupidity of nationalism and 13 quotes from Fahrenheit 451.
i was just wanting to know when this was published the date of it
1948. Amazing, isn’t it.
It was published in 1948… Don’t be sarcastic when you don’t know your stuff :)
1949*
It baffled me to read the question and baffled me even more to see it took your response to get here. The answer is written in the article.
It was published in 1949. It was named 1984 because Orwell began writing it in ’48, but it wasn’t published until a year later.
Interestingly, in the book Winston doesn’t know if it’s 84 or 85 anymore because years have become irrelevant.
1984 is a work that every high school student should read along with Machiavelli’s The Prince and Eric Hoffer’s True Believer. “Politics and the English Language” wouldn’t hurt either. These works show how dictatorship works and it works only because we let it. Orthodoxy and fanaticism are the road to slavery. Beware!!
You assume that Americans can understand what they read.
Ignorance is strength.
and one Presidential candidate actually said ” I love the uneducated”
“How stupid are the people of Iowa?” said Trump–in Iowa, the only battleground state in which he has consistently been ahead in the polls.
We drank the look aid again
Leave to a Hillary voter to change history on a page about 1984.
In regards to comments by Ben Carson having changed his behavior overnight – “Trump was flabbergasted: “How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?”
Facts being distorted tells us more about WHOM you believe in more than what you believe in
I’m thinking we should open all the prisons and let them all run for president so they can pardon themselves. Why not? They all insist they’re innocent too.
And “Animal Farm”. Brilliant works. Although I could only read “1984” once. It was too dark and ugly to reread.
It’s become true. how ugly is that?
This really makes you think!!
Everyone loves Big Mother.
Wait What Big Mother XD
I wonder how many people even realise Orwell wasn’t writing about our dystopian future. 1984 is the story of early childhood, a toddler’s heroic struggle for independence and self-determination before their rebellious streak is annihilated by the loving violence of a mother that Knows Best, a Big Mother (if you’re a toddler) who reverses values to illogical (deceit is nice, Truth is rude, mindless obedience is rewarded, inquisitive thought is punished, violence is love, God is good, etc).
This is a story we know already. We’re all Winston. We all won the battle over ourselves. We all love Big Mother.
“The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”
– (Orwell, 1984)
What a load of pretentious rubbish .. you have no idea what the book was really about.
Yeah, the dude has no idea or doesn’t want to admit the true premise of the book,
Obviously he is a Democrat.
Because there can only ever be one meaning to literature, right? [/sarcasm]
Orweill said what the book was about!!!!
The article said what it was about!!
So yeah, in this case there is only ONE (1) meaning!! But people are just too ignorant and/ or inept to pay attention and actually comprehend or retain anything of actual use. But they can damn sure tell you when that Kardashian whore got married or Minaj’s birthday.
This is genius, actually. One way you can tell, is in the empty vitriol you get from respondents like Adam.
I have often marveled at how much autobiography can be found in science fiction. Philip Dick and Ray Bradbury are also great examples of this. Bradbury even admitted that many of his short story ideas come from semi-conscious sources like dreams and old memories. So, it’s not at all an unreasonable inference to suggest origins like childhood trauma for these stories.
Saying 1984 is “really” about something else is absurd. That isn’t genius; it’s a joke. The only point of similarity in the comparison to early childhood is that both are concerned with power.
As for autobiography in authors’ writings, unless you have actual, hard evidence for that, it’s also a joke.
It was actually “about” Stalin’s dictatorship. A warning.
Are you really believing that? Can you not see how Animal Farm ties into that same future or is that just a story about a day at the farm?
Next you’ll be telling us “animal farm” is about our teen years.you have zero idea what you’re talking about.
Interesting slant and it works. Equally it works in employment too. I worked for a multi-national organisation where the overall strategy was one of denial ( we never said that, we’ve always been at war with….) twisting words, and accusations of cynicism when all you were doing was being a realist. The trouble is that people keep quiet and don’t challenge simply out of fear of losing a job. Natural but it doesn’t help to make things better!
Wow Jonny, I missed all that and I read the book. Thanks for sharing.
You sound like someone who did not like his mother.
Smells of leftist disinformation, nothing more, nothing less just like ‘cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory’, ‘the gulags were just like the Western prison system’, ‘ Stalin never killed no one okay” and that old favourite ‘communism was never implemented properly’.
to this day britain is still murdering it citizens, its committing social cleansing of mentally ill, pedos and long term unemployed…..yes unemplyed, yes unemploted is a capitaol offoice in britain, if you dont pay taxes for too long u will disappear just like the homeless & scitzos do!!!
thats what the book was reslly about, orwell knew bak then what the brit military was secretly doing to tit citzens
Where is “We are the dead,” on this list?
It’s my favourite quote, and I feel it rings true, if not also depressingly.
The picture of the Big brother poster is wrong, he had a mustache!!!!
It’s obvious the dumbing down of the world was accomplished by market forces that now use these quotes reformulated in so called business speak. C’mon admit it. Are you blind. All hail stale rock n roll. Not me. I’m still growing.
Orwell would probably be surprised it’s taken so long
Why do I feel that this is where we are right now?? https://t.co/v44CpvZEZY
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? ~ Orwell, 1984 (glad I had to read it).…
Scary stuff. This man knew the future
Either he was a mind reader or he got lucky, either way unlucky for us.
Need a dictionary to tell you the def of Irony?
The orangeman and Steve Bannon must be stopped.
Ask Mickey Mouse to give his friend Donald “Duck” Trump a serious talking to….Daisy Duck can take care of Bannon!
From “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism”, the book within the book:
“Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.”
USSR, Cuba, N. Korea.
Also from Goldstein’s book. It’s a long one, but it’s worth it.
“The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”
Doublethink: the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them
George Orwell “The object of persecution is persecution.The object of power is power” The object of Brexit is Brexit https://t.co/o04zFLW27n
Orwell knew all about #DoubleThink and #Newspeak and so does Fox “News”
“Donald Trump” debuted his acting career as “himself” on “the Jefferson’s” in 1981. He’s acted in numerous roles as “himself” ever since. Just like Elvira. Just like “the Unknown comic”. Just like “Prince” or “Tiny Tim”. He’s a FICTIONAL character…
Of course you already know that though… now go back to NOT knowing it again.
It is truly amazing that so many of these comments reflect a reading of 1984, but no logical understanding. The Trump administration, despite its faults, is the polar opposite of an oppressive Orwellian hegemony. While I ca’t say this for most Republicans, he is actually trying to empower the people of Iowa (etc.), whom he knows are not stupid, though perhaps often less “educated.” You “educated folk” cling to the ignorance that is your power. You are the double thinkers, and you don’t know it, but that is classic Orwell. Yes, you are too educated to recognize common sense, so do the opposite, and scream for even bigger government that defines the left. And, don’t listen to anyone who disagrees with your “enlightened” perspective, because “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”…night is day, up is down, black is white. Let’s take down all of our historic statues and erase the past on our well educated, sophisticated road to PC utopia. Do most people even know that the Nazi party was/is Socialist?
Bill, they not only don’t get it, their indoctrination to the alphabet media narrative has turned many people who had a thought into mindless sheep. The PC culture has imbedded itself in every facet of our daily lives. Only those who think critically for themselves, the ones who know history and are willing to research facts for themselves, are left to help with the re-education. Silence is a killer of freedom and people need to stand up and be able to defend against the insanity.
PC=Newspeak
educated=indoctrinated=brainwashed=dogmatized.
I don’t even know how I got to this website. I was reading some information about George Orwell’s 1984. Some of the comments on here are very intelligent and some are very ignorant. I don’t claim to be the former or the latter, but I do know that we live in a time when political correctness has silenced too many people. Free speech doesn’t even mean free speech anymore because it’s only a privilege for some. That is not what this country was built on, that is not what I think of when I think of what it means to be an American. Too many people have lost their interest in expressing patriotism because too many others are trying to silence the foundation of this country. Our basic beliefs have become a private way of life but ironically everyone knows what they are. Everyone else is an expert on how we are supposed to think instead of us remembering that we have minds of Our Own. Whatever happened to Growing Up and becoming our own person instead of looking at our front doors and realizing that there are people out there that want to tell us what to think and what to believe. Well, I think we’re better than that as Americans, I think we should know that we do have the freedom to discuss and communicate what we believe and think without hurting one another. Some people just forget how to do that.
Nice to see a few people here get it.
Big Brother, aka, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, has silenced Alex Jones. Control speech, erase those who speak out.
Not a fan of AJ but I don’t need or want these people dictating who I can and cannot listen to. I can make up my own mind about the information people like Alex Jones provides, yet Big Brother sees it otherwise.
1984 is chilling and we seem to be living the nightmare of it, driven by the Left. They cannot argue for their beliefs so they simply seek to silence.
Blah, blah, blah. Infowars is for entertainment purposes only. Alex Jones even declared so during a child custody case. Why should he be immune from social media (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) ‘terms of service’ just to appease your paranoia about censorship? He was spewing hatred and instigating violence with baseless sensationalism. Pig-human hybrids, Parkland shooting survivors were paid actors…. Do you really believe that stuff?
It’s become true. how ugly is that?
“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.”……..Now there’s a good slogan for that twat corbyn !
…”and then the end will come…”
Can someone explain this quote please “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
Thank you.
I have some thoughts on that quote/topic.
Most people (“bulk of mankind”) would rather have creature comforts than liberty. For them it is better to be comfortable (and shut up) than to object to the tyranny of any police state dictatorship. In our high tech surveillance governments it is better to “shut up” than to be persecuted, imprisoned or tortured.
This 1984 quote seem consistent with this.
“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
Because in Happiness there is no struggle. In freedom you are fighting some or some entity everyday.
Quote from Bravehart “FREEEEEEEDDDDDOOOOOMMMM.”
IT is the only thing.
Robert Freddie: Lain
You conveniently forgot “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Maybe we should join together and stop what is happening and only getting worse. We and all ethnic groups other than BLM’s is asking for more and more and getting a lot of America under control….why? Let’s stand up for our Democracy.
We need to stand up we need to demand the rights of our Democracy and not let a small group of one ethnic group say they will fight til they get everything they want.
They want total control. Let’s stand up.
I’m from the future, the past will already been rewritten, at this time they rewrite our present.
It all has been fulfilled. 2+2=5 at the moment, maybe tomorrow it will be 3.
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
This perfectly speaks to the left’s concept that men can have babies all the while knowing that is entirely impossible!!!