Written by English author George Orwell, the novel 1984 is considered one of the most terrifying novels ever written; not because it revolves around scary fictional characters, but because it shows what horrifying actions individuals can take when given too much power.
As you’ve probably guessed, the book is set in the year 1984, where the “Party” takes full control over most of the world’s population. Individualism and independent thinking are banned, everyone is manipulated and under constant surveillance -- “Big Brother” is watching them.
The politics and psychology of 1984 run very deep. The members of the “Party” use brutal force and mind control to make sure individuals are kept in line. Anyone who tries to live by their own rules is labeled a traitor and terribly punished.
The dystopian novel 1984 focuses on the darker side of life, forcing the reader to think about the consequences of giving someone too much control over one’s life, making it impossible not to feel anger and helplessness while reading it.
However, the picture the book paints can also act as a powerful catalyst for taking action and finding ways to have a positive impact on the world.
Here are 20 brilliant 1984 quotes that will blow your mind:
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
In the face of pain there are no heroes.
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
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.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.
