Quotes About Control

Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

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

The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies

They fear love because it creates a world they can't control.

Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened —that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?...But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated...'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan,'controls the future:who controls the present controls the past.'...All that was needed was a series of victories over your own memory.

The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.

Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?

We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

the people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens

Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.

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

Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness – on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed.

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...

Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.

The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

He wondered vaguely how many others like here there might be in the younger generation, people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.

From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.

George Orwell

In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

You wanted a good time; they, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.