1984 Key Quotes Flashcards
Power and Control
“‘who controls the past,’ ran the Party
slogan, ‘controls the future: who
controls the present controls the
past’”
“WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” - Party
Slogan
“power is in tearing human minds to
pieces and putting them together
again in new shapes of your own
choosing” - O’Brien
“the Party seeks power entirely for
its own sake”, “we are not interested
in the good of others; we are
interested solely in power” - O’Brien
“in the end the Party would announce
that two and two made five, and you
would have to believe it”
“Syme will be vaporised, he is too
intelligent”
“the eyes follow you about when you
move” - Big Brother
“Winston kept his back to the
telescreen, it was safer, though, even
a back can be revealing”
“if you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a
human face - for ever.”
he created Captain Ogilvy
“war is a way of shattering to pieces…
materials which might otherwise be
used to make the masses too
comfortable and hence in the long run
too intelligent”
Identity and Individuality
“in the end we shall make
thoughtcrime literally impossible,
because there will be no words in
which to express it” - Syme on
Newspeak
“nothing was your own except the
few cubic centimetres inside your
skull”
“doublethink means the power of
holding two contradictory beliefs in
one’s mind simultaneously, and
accepting both of them.”
“if you want to keep a secret, you
must also hide it from yourself”
“your worst enemy, he reflected, was
your own nervous system”
Love and Sex
“Listen. The more men you’ve had,
the more I love you. Do you
understand that?” - Winston to Julia
“perhaps one did not want to be
loved so much as to be understood” - O’Brien
“no emotion was pure because
everything was mixed up with fear
and hatred”
“their embrace… was a blow struck
against the party, it was a political
act”
Hope
“freedom is the freedom to say that
two plus two makes four”
“if there is hope, it lies in the proles”
“at the sight of the words ‘I love you’
the desire to stay alive had welled up
in him”
“the birds sang, the Proles sang, the
Party did not sing”
“the paperweight was the room he
was in and the coral was Julia’s life
and his own” - link to Offred’s time
with Nick and the Commander
“the room was a world, a pocket of
the past where extinct animals could
walk”
Manipulation
“you are mentally deranged, you suffer
from a defective memory… fortunately
you are curable”
“there were times when… the mere
sight of a fist pulled back from a blow
was enough to pour forth the
confession of real and imagined
crimes”
