Quote collection
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"The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed."
"From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned."
"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad."
"The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good."
"When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask whose side I'm on."
"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power."
"The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink"
"The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
"Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
"The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham ."
"In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else."
"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."
"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."
"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
"The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal."
"Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force."
"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing."
"I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment."
"Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations."