"Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear."
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Quote collection
George Orwell quotes (page 8 of 39)
767 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else."
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"The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system."
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"Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples."
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"The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon."
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"Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes."
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"To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up."
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"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself."
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"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."
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"News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising."
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"One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ' Socialism ' and ' Communism ' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England."
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"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
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"Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom."
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"Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy"
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"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing."
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"To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself."
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"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection."
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"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox."
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"Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever."
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"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime."
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