Quotes · Skopia

14 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Totalitarianism✕clear

Novel · Dystopian fiction

By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.1

Novel · Dystopian fiction

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

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.2

Novel · Dystopian fiction

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

Philosophical literature

We are now brought face to face with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to "the conquest of nature" and in particular of human nature, what no earlier tyranny ever became: perpetual and universal.

1948

★ 3.5

Essay · Anthology · Historical literature

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists.... The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened"—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.

1943

★ 3.6

Political literature

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

The Origins of Totalinarianism · 1951

★ 3.6

Political literature · Philosophical literature

The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.

1969

★ 3.7

Novel · Dystopian fiction

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.8

Novel · Allegory · Dystopian fiction

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.

Animal Farm · 1945

★ 3.9

Novel · Dystopian fiction

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

Novel · Dystopian fiction

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.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

There can now be no doubt that it is Stalin rather than Hitler, who is the most alarming figure of the twentieth century. I say this-I say this not merely because Stalin killed more people than Hitler-though clearly he did-and not even because of Stalin was more of a psychopath than Hitler-although clearly he was. I say it because Stalin was not a one-off like Hitler, an eruption from nowhere. Stalin stands in a historical tradition of rule by terror which existed before him, which he refined, and which could exist again. His, not Hitler's, is the spectre that should worry us.

Archangel · 1998

★ 5.9

Play · Tragic play

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

1821

★ 6.9

Novel · Dystopian fiction

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 7.4