In George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” Winston Smith embodies individuality in an oppressive society.
A 39-year-old intellectual working in the Ministry of Truth, Winston is tasked with altering historical records to suit the authoritarian government’s narratives.
Despite outwardly following the regime’s rules, he inwardly despises the Party and Big Brother.
He courageously questions their actions, echoing Orwell’s warning to readers about the dangers of complacency in oppressive conditions.
Winston 1984 Quotes With Page Numbers
“The poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 1, Pages 1, 2
“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ”
~George Orwell, 1984, (The narrator about Winston Smith’s thoughts), Part one, Chapter 2, Page 27
“How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One, Chapter 2, Page 27
“He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One, Chapter 2, Page 28
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One, Chapter 2, Page 28
“Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One, Chapter 3, Page 30
“With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One, Chapter 3, Page 31
“More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure of the Party simply disappeared and were never heard of again.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 4, Pages 44-45
“Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother’s familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them…easy to imitate.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 4, Page 46
“Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 4, Pages 47-48
“One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 5, Page 53
“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston’s thoughts, Part One, Chapter 6, Pages 63-64
“If there is hope it lies in the proles.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 7, Page 69
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they can’t become conscious.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston, Part One, Chapter 7, Page 70
“At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be ALONE in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 7, Page 80
“I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 7, Page 80
“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?”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 7, Page 80
“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
~George Orwell, 1984, (The narrator about Winston’s thoughts), Part One, Chapter 7, Page 80
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 7, Page 81
“It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob: utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part One. Chapter 8, Pages 96-97
“At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 1, Page 109
“Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated. The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston and Julia, Part Two. Chapter 2, Pages 123-24
“Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 2, Page 125
“Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you . . . I hate purity. I hate goodness. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 2, Page 125
“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, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 2, Page 126
“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, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 2, Page 126
“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. ‘We are the dead,’ he said.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 3, Page 135
“In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 3, Page 135
“I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 3, Page 136
“So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 3, Page 136
“I don’t think it’s anything—I mean, I don’t think it was ever put to any use. That’s what I like about it. It’s a little chunk of history that they’ve forgotten to alter. It’s a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 4, Page 145
“The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith and Julia, Part Two. Chapter 5, Page 150
“So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith and Julia, Part Two. Chapter 5, Page 151
“Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 5, Page 152
“I don’t imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetime. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there—small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 5, Page 155
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 5, Page 155
“‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,’ he told her.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 5, Page 156
“He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 6, Page 159
“He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it. The clamorous hunger in his belly seemed to justify him.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 7, Page 162
“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
~George Orwell, 1984, (The narrator about Winston Smith), Part Two, Chapter 7, Page 164
“They can’t get inside you. If you can FEEL that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.’ If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 7, Page 166
“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.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 7, Page 166
“We believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, some kind of secret organization working against the Party, and that you are involved in it. We want to join it and work for it. We are enemies of the Party. We disbelieve in the principles of Ingsoc. We are thought-criminals. We are also adulterers. I tell you this because we want to put ourselves at your mercy. If you want us to incriminate ourselves in any other way, we are ready.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two. Chapter 8, Page 170
“The best books…are those that tell you what you know already.”
~George Orwell, 1984, (The narrator about Winston Smith), Part Two, Chapter 8, Page 200
“Sanity is not statistical.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two, Chapter 10, Page 218
“The future belonged to the proles.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Two, Chapter 10, Page 220
“They could do nothing except stand gazing into one another’s eyes. To run for life, to get out of the house before it was too late – no such thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor uncovering the telescreen behind it.
‘Now they can see us,’ said Julia.
‘Now we can see you,’ said the voice.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith and Julia, Part Two, Chapter 10, Pages 221-22
“It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes’ life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Three, Chapter 1, Page 229
“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.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Three, Chapter 1, Page 239
“There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Three, Chapter 2, Page 240
“‘I am taking trouble with you, Winston,’ he said, ‘because you are worth trouble. You know perfectly well what is the matter with you. You have known it for years, though you have fought against the knowledge. You are mentally deranged. You suffer from a defective memory. You are unable to remember real events and you persuade yourself that you remember other events which never happened. Fortunately it is curable. You have never cured yourself of it, because you did not choose to. There was a small effort of the will that you were not ready to make. Even now, I am well aware, you are clinging to your disease under the impression that it is a virtue. Now we will take an example. At this moment, which power is Oceania at war with?’”
~George Orwell, 1984, O’Brien and Winston Smith, Part Three, Chapter 2, Pages 245-46
“‘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.’”
~George Orwell, 1984, O’Brien and Winston Smith, Pages 250-251
“The old feeling, that at bottom it did not matter whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy, had come back. O’Brien was a person who could be talked to…O’Brien had tortured him to the edge of lunacy, and in a little while, it was certain, he would send him to his death. It made no difference.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part Three, Chapter 2, Page 252
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Three, Chapter 2, Page 252
“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
~George Orwell, 1984, (O’Brien and Winston Smith), Part Three, Chapter Two, Page 259
“‘Does Big Brother exist?’
‘Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother if the embodiment of the Party.’
‘Does he exist like you or me?’
‘You do not exist’, said O’Brien.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith and O’Brien, Part Three, Chapter 2, Page 259
“That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith’s thoughts, Part Three, Chapter 3, Page 262
“What can you do, thought Winston, aagainst the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself; who gives your arguments a fair hearing and simply persists in his lunacy?”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith’s Thoughts, Part Three, Chapter 3, Page 262
“If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent.”
~George Orwell, 1984, O’Brien about Winston Smith, Part Three, Chapter 3, Page 270
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how soon will they shoot me?’
‘It might be a long time,’ said O’Brien. ‘You are a difficult case. But don’t give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.’”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith and O’Brien, Part Three, Chapter 3, Page 274
“To die hating them, that was freedom.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part Three, Chapter 4, Page 281
“For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith, Part 3, Chapter 4, Page 281
“He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.
‘White to play and mate in two moves.’
Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith and O’Brien, Part 3, Chapter 6, Page 289
“Almost unconsciously, Winston traces in the dust on the table: ‘2+2=5.’”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part 3, Chapter 6, Page 290
“‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.
‘I betrayed you,’ he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something – something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about.’”
~George Orwell, 1984, Winston Smith and Julia, Part 3, Chapter 6, Page 292
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
~George Orwell, 1984, The Narrator about Winston Smith, Part 3, Chapter 6, Page 297-98
Winston Smith Character Analysis
Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984, is a complex character facing profound existential dilemmas within a highly controlled dystopian society.
Throughout the novel, he displays a consistent doubt and disillusionment with Big Brother’s totalitarian regime, often expressed through statements such as “He was already dead,” (Part One, Chapter 2, Page 28), reflecting his grim outlook on life under this oppressive regime.
Smith yearns for a return to freedom of thought, writing of a time when “thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone” (Part One, Chapter 2, Page 28). His longing for an era of truth and independence underscores his deep-seated dissatisfaction with his environment.
In a society where independent thought and personality are barred, Smith takes a rebellious stand and even imitates Big Brother’s “military and pedantic” style while dictating a speakwrite, as quoted from Part One, Chapter 4, Page 46.
This action reveals Smith’s dare and willingness to question the regime’s stringent control over individuality.
Smith’s resistance to the Party’s manipulation of truth is well demonstrated in his assertion, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows” (Part One, Chapter 7, Page 81).
This quote illustrates Smith’s strong belief in objective reality and refusal to submit to the Party’s attempt to control the truth.
Despite living in constant fear, Winston holds onto hope, targeting the proles as the source of potential rebellion and, consequently, societal change, as he states: “If there is hope it lies in the proles” (Part One, Chapter 7, Page 69). In this case, his hope is driven by his staunch belief that awakening consciousness could lead to rebellion.
Winston continually battled the terror of being perceived as a lunatic due to his dissenting beliefs, musing, “Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one” (Part One, Chapter 7, Page 80). Despite his fear, he is steadfast in his convictions, indicating his strong sense of self.
His deep desire for human connection and love is established when he mentions that “At the sight of the words ‘I love you the desire to stay alive’ had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid” (Part Two, Chapter 1, Page 109).
This longing demonstrates his inherent humanity and yearning for genuine relationships, feelings suppressed by the Party’s domination.
Smith’s character essentially resonates with the struggle of ‘an individual vs a system.’ He constantly conflicts with the Party’s efforts to control his thoughts and beliefs. This Neurotic tension within him is highlighted when Orwell writes, “Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system” (Part One, Chapter 6, Pages 63-64).
Paradoxically, Winston is drawn toward anything that symbolizes decay or declining morality, saying, “Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.”
This unusual mindset reflects his mental state of turmoil and his ultimate desire to regularize the abnormality enforced by the Party.
In conclusion, Winston Smith is a character who, despite living in an oppressive regime where his every thought and action is controlled, champions individual freedom, truth, and love, standing as a symbol of defiance in George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, 1984.
What is Winston’s job quote?
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
~George Orwell, 1984, (Winston Smith), Part Three, Chapter 2, Page 248