Quotes About Authority

Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.

Quien con­tro­la el pa­sa­do —decía la con­sig­na del Par­ti­do— con­tro­la el fu­tu­ro. Quien con­tro­la el pre­sen­te con­tro­la el pa­sa­do

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.

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

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.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

He loved Big Brother.

Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.

Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones back? Once again this argument was unanswerable. Certainly the animals did not want Jones back; if the holding of debates on Sunday mornings was liable to bring him back, then the debates must stop. Boxer, who had now had time to think things over, voiced the general feeling by saying: If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right. And from then on he adopted the maxim, Napoleon is always right, in addition to his private motto of I will work harder.

Todos los animales son iguales, pero algunos son más iguales que otros.

The command of the old despotisms was Thou shalt not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou shalt. Our command is Thou art.

The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable-what then?

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possiblity of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover against his will what another human being is thinking and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.

I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.

People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.

Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades, cried Squealer almost pleadingly

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

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

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