Orwell The Party Quotes

#1. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself.

George Orwell

#2. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania,

George Orwell

#3. 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.

George Orwell

#4. a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This

George Orwell

#5. the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They

George Orwell

#6. 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

George Orwell

#7. If the Party could thrust its had into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened-that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death.

George Orwell

#8. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five - then how many?'
'Four.

George Orwell

#9. Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.

George Orwell

#10. It is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones:

George Orwell

#11. The Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It

George Orwell

#12. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great

George Orwell

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

George Orwell

#14. That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.

George Orwell

#15. It is a horrible thing to have to enter into the details
of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a cesspool.

George Orwell

#16. 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.

George Orwell

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

George Orwell

#18. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.

George Orwell

#19. The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual

George Orwell

#20. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

George Orwell

#21. It has been denied that any direct pressure was exerted by the Russian Government, but the point is not of great importance, for the Communist parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy, and it is not denied that the Communist Party was the chief

George Orwell

#22. If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles. If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.

George Orwell

#23. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism.

George Orwell

#24. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.

George Orwell

#25. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries.

George Orwell

#26. Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.

George Orwell

#27. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Whatever the Party holds
to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except
by looking through the eyes of the Party.

George Orwell

#28. The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.

George Orwell

#29. My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.

Gary Kemp

#30. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

George Orwell

#31. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all

George Orwell

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

George Orwell

#33. It was curious how that beetlelike type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

George Orwell

#34. Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.

George Orwell

#35. Any kind of organized revolt against the party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing to do was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

George Orwell

#36. We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.

George Orwell

#37. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

George Orwell

#38. Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.

George Orwell