"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it."
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George Orwell quotes (page 3 of 39)
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"Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly."
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"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
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"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
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"Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them."
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"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."
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"He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."
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"The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same."
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"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
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"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
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"Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals."
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"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
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"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."
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"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to he a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
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"Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils."
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"The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better."
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"Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."
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"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now."
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"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."
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"The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes."
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