1984 Quotes on Love & Censorship by George Orwell (2021)

Although this classic dystopian novel focuses on the dark side, these 1984 quotes will brighten up your life.

1984 is George Orwell’s bleakly dystopian novel about life under constant scrutiny. In the novel, Orwell describes the future in a totalitarian state where thoughts and actions are scrutinized by the ever-watchful Big Brother.

The book follows the life of Winston Smith, a lower member of the ruling authoritarian political party who feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth but he secretly dislikes the party and dreams of rebellion against Big Brother. He has also entered a forbidden relationship with coworker Julia and dares to write his criminal thoughts in a diary.

1984 is a modern classic that has had an impact from the moment it was released. It introduced many terms and concepts that have entered common usage, including Big Brother, doublespeak, and thoughtcrime.

The book has received various awards, including being chosen as one of the 100 best English-language novels by Time Magazine, being listed at #8 on The Big Read survey done by the BBC, and a place on the list of Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels.

Below is our collection of inspirational, powerful, and thought-provoking 1984 quotes that will blow your mind and make you want to create positive change.

Also, check out these timeless Fahrenheit 451 quotes that will inspire you to think differently.

1984 Quotes That Will Change The Way You See The World

1. “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.” ― George Orwell

2. “For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.  ” ― George Orwell

3. “Even if you are a minority of one it does not make you wrong.” ― George Orwell

4. “If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.” ― George Orwell

5. “It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.” ― George Orwell

6. “The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.” ― George Orwell

7. “Where there is equality there can be sanity.” ― George Orwell

8. “The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?” ― George Orwell

9. “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.” ― George Orwell

10. “If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope.” ― George Orwell

Also, check out these Animal Farm quotes on the power of too much power.

1984 quotes that will inspire you to find ways to change the world

11. “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.” ― George Orwell

12. “War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.” ― George Orwell

13. “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” ― George Orwell

14. “Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.” ― George Orwell

15. “Why was it that they could never shout like that about something that mattered?”― George Orwell

16. “If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.” ― George Orwell

17. “We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.” ― George Orwell

18. “In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four.” ― George Orwell

19. “The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.” ― George Orwell

20. “But the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.” ― George Orwell

Don’t forget to also check out these Macbeth quotes about power and ambition.

1984 quotes that will change the way you think

21. “It was like trying to make a move at chess when you were already mated.” ― George Orwell

22. “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”― George Orwell

23. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” ― George Orwell

24. “It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.” ― George Orwell

25. “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” ― George Orwell

26. “But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” ― George Orwell

27. “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”― George Orwell

28. “If you loved someone, you love them and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave them love.” ― George Orwell

29. “In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.” ― George Orwell

30. “To think, to think, even with a split second left—to think was the only hope.” ― George Orwell

You might also like these classic Of Mice of Men quotes that will inspire you to keep your head up.

1984 quotes that resonate more than ever

31. “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” ― George Orwell

32. “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.” ― George Orwell

33. “Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.” ― George Orwell

34. “If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.” ― George Orwell

35. “But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable; it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.” ― George Orwell

36. “When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.”― George Orwell

37. “How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished?” ― George Orwell

38. “All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.” ― George Orwell

39. “Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.” ― George Orwell,

40. “Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.” ― George Orwell

More 1984 quotes to inspire and motivate

41. “The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction.” ― George Orwell

42. “Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.” ― George Orwell

43. “It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.” ― George Orwell

44. “No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.” ― George Orwell

45. “But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive.” ― George Orwell

46. “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

47. “That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.” ― George Orwell

48. “Sanity is not statistical.” ― George Orwell

49. “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” ― George Orwell

50. “The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.” ― George Orwell

Also read these Brave New World quotes from the controversial dystopian novel.

Other 1984 quotes and lines

51. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” – George Orwell

52. “The best books are those that tell you what you know already.” – George Orwell

53. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell

54. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” – George Orwell

55. “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” – George Orwell

56. “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” – George Orwell

57. “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” – George Orwell

58. “Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.” – George Orwell

59. “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.” – George Orwell

60. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell

More 1984 quotes from George Orwell’s classic novel

61. “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” — George Orwell

62. “At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.” — George Orwell

63. “Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.” — George Orwell

64. “Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape.” — George Orwell

65. “How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?” — George Orwell

66. “What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?” — George Orwell

67. “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

68. “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.” — George Orwell

69. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” — George Orwell

70. “Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.” — George Orwell

More 1984 quotes from George Orwell

71. “Confession is not betrayal.” — George Orwell 

72. “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” — George Orwell 

73. “We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.” — George Orwell 

74. “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” — George Orwell 

75. “The best books . . .  are those that tell you what you know already.” — George Orwell 

76. “All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.” — Geore Orwell  

77. “Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” — George Orwell 

78. “I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.” — George Orwell  

79. “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” — George Orwell 

80. “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.” — George Orwell 

Which of these 1984 quotes was your favorite?

1984 is a classic literary novel not only because of the vast amount of questions and thoughts it provokes, but also because it’s brilliantly written with a searing conscience.

The book is a prefect reminder of the dangers of totalitarianism and a world governed by propaganda, surveillance, and censorship. Hopefully, the quotes above have inspired you to take action and find ways to have a positive impact on the world.

Did you enjoy these 1984 quotes? Which of the quotes was your favorite? Let us know in the comment section below. Also, don’t forget to share with your friends and followers.