Quote collection
767 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak."
"Big Brother is watching you."
"Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it."
"What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect."
"Never use a long word where a short one will do."
"A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into."
"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful."
"We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."
"Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull."
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."
"Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money."
"One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting."
"The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes."
"His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” —which he had adopted as his personal motto."
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?"
"Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter."
"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
"...in the negative part of Professor's Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of."
"The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time."
"Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below."