Quotes About Dystopia

If there is hope, it lies in the proles.

Does Big Brother exist? Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party. Does he exist in the same way as I exist? You do not exist.

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

No sentimentality, comrade...The only good human being is a dead one.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:   WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Parsons was Winston's fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms--one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the Party depended.

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as the truth exists. […] The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, It never happened—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs […]

The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometer of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-guns nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons

This was not illegal, (nothing was illegal since there were no longer laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death...

George Orwell

We are the dead,' he said. 'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully. 'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.

The most gifted of [the Proletariate], who might possibly become a nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated.

Quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted.

And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.

I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.

The [Victory Gin] was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.

Una paz que fuera de verdad permanente sería lo mismo que una guerra permanente. Este es el sentido verdadero de la consigna del Partido: la guerra es la paz.