War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

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 Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power – pure power.

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.

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?

Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.