“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
Work
Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often referred to as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by the English novelist George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair). It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated. ---------- Also contained in: [Novels (Animal Farm / Burmese Days / Clergyman's Daughter / Coming Up for Air / Keep the Aspidistra Flying / Nineteen Eighty-Four)](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1168045W) [Novels (Animal Farm / Nineteen Eighty-Four)](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1167981W) [Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1168095W)
Quotes
Showing 1-23 of 23
George Orwell
Canonical work source
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
“He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.”
“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 p...”
“The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.”
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
“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.”
“Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?”
“I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human...”
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.' 'Nonsense. The earth is as old a...”
“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.”
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contra...”
“So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”
“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.”
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big B...”
“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but b...”
“At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, gene...”
“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because...”
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: Fr...”
“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 min...”