Thought Police

The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) are the secret police of Oceania in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime and thought-criminals. They use psychology and omnipresent surveillance (such as telescreens) to monitor, search, find and arrest members of society who could potentially challenge authority and status quo, even only by thought, hence the name Thought Police. They use terror and torture to achieve their ends.

It also had much to do with Orwell's own "power of facing unpleasant facts," as he called it, and his willingness to criticize prevailing ideas which brought him into conflict with others and their "smelly little orthodoxies."

Read more about Thought Police:  Operations, Other Uses

Famous quotes containing the words thought and/or police:

    It is cotter-pinned, it is bedded true.
    Everything its parts can do
    Has been thought out and accounted for.
    Your least touch sets it going round,
    And when top stop it rests with you.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all men ... that alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.
    Georges Bataille (1897–1962)