TheBreakaway | BreakawayConciousness
Zy Marquiez
May 16, 2017
Orwell’s landmark piece, 1984, has resonated with millions of readers, and with good reason: it speaks to the pervasive encroaching totalitarianism that seeks to strangle the individual that has historically taken place throughout history.
In the same light, what follows are some of Orwell’s wise words collated to incite some rumination between incisive and inquiring individuals.
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, to instinctively using to long words and exhausted idioms, like cuttlefish squirting out link.”
“…to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy…” [This statement influenced readers to see that lying government leaders were pretending to a moral sense they did not possess.][Subsequent commentary Jon Rappoport of NoMoreFakeNews.com]
“But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version.” [Generations of readers realized that the government was simply inventing itself as it wanted the public to see it. Government was a hoax. And if government was a hoax, and you wanted to reveal that, you would have to find a way into secret communications. Thus, Orwell spawned untold numbers of independent spies who began looking into the private communications of political power players.] [Subsequent commentary Jon Rappoport]
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Jon Rappoport
[This statement alerted readers that news networks were omitting a whole range of ideas about the true actions of government—and therefore, again, independent citizens would have to dig into the personal communications of leaders, in order to discover what they were actually thinking and talking about.] [Subsequent commentary Jon Rappoport]
“…perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface…” [Readers, generations of readers took to that phrase. If the Party was rotten, then you had to go under the surface to find that out. You had to scrape into the private corruption behind the public face.] [Subsequent commentary Jon Rappoport]
“The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought… All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.” [The effect of this inflammatory statement is obvious. Rebels, generations of rebels have probed the inner workings of the government, in order to expose what the government is actually doing, in order to prevent a complete takeover.] [Subsequent commentary Jon Rappoport]
“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”
– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. 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. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. 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 object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
“Big Brother is Watching You.”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
“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.”
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”
“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”
“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
“It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail on her hand.”
“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?”
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
“You are a slow learner, Winston.”
“How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”
“Sanity is not statistical.”
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ”
“The only good human being is a dead one.”
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
“To die hating them, that was freedom.”
“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”
“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
“Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O’Brien: Of course he exists.
Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?
O’Brien: You do not exist.”
“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
“This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”
“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”
“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.”
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
“If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.”
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern…Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
“Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.”
“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’.”
“Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”
“In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.”
“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.”
“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”
“If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
“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.”
“You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,’ he told her.”
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink”
“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing”
“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 object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
“April the 4th, 1984. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man – greetings!”
“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”
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About The Author:
Zy Marquiez is an avid book reviewer, researcher, an open-minded skeptic, yogi, humanitarian, and freelance writer who studies and mirrors regularly subjects like Consciousness, Education, Creativity, The Individual, Ancient History & Ancient Civilizations, Forbidden Archaeology, Big Pharma, Alternative Health, Space, Geoengineering, Social Engineering, Propaganda, and much more.
His other blog, BreakawayConsciousnessBlog.wordpress.com features mainly his personal work, while TheBreakaway.wordpress.com serves as a media portal which mirrors vital information nigh always ignored by mainstream press, but still highly crucial to our individual understanding of various facets of the world.
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