Quotes by George Orwell

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Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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There are only four ways a ruling group can fall. Either he is defeated from without, or he governs so unsatisfactory that the masses revolt against him, or he allows a powerful and disaffected middle group to emerge, or he loses his confidence and inclination to govern. These reasons do not act separately, usually all four are present to some extent. The ruling class that can defend itself against all four can stay in power permanently. Ultimately, the decisive factor is the intellectual attitude of the ruling class itself.

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Being in the minority, even if you are the minority, does not mean that someone is crazy. There is truth and there are lies, and if we stick to the truth even against the whole world, we are not crazy.

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It had never occurred to him until now that a fifty-year-old woman's body, grown to enormous proportions by childbirth, then hardened and roughened by work until it was as rough as an overripe carrot, could be beautiful. It was, and anyway, why couldn't it be? - thought. The muscular, block-of-granite body without definite contours and the raspy, red skin were related to a girl's body like a rosehip to a rosehip. Why should the fruit be considered inferior to the flower?

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Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one before it and wiser than the one after it.

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If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot forever treading on a human face.

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It was just a hopeless dream, a passing day in April. My dreams still stirred me up, And you stole my heart.

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Things that have happened cannot be denied under any circumstances. These can be investigated and extracted from a person by torture. But if the goal is not to stay alive, but to remain human, what does such a thing really matter? They can't change your feelings. After all, you can't change them yourself, even if you wanted to. They can reveal everything you did, said or thought, down to the smallest detail; however, the interior of your heart, the workings of which are a mystery even to yourself, is impenetrable.

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The best teacher is the one who gradually makes himself redundant.

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Man is the only living creature that consumes without producing. He cannot give milk, he cannot lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plow, and he is not fast enough to catch the rabbit. Yet he is the lord of animals.

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No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a tool; power is the goal. One does not make a dictatorship in order to protect a revolution, but one makes a revolution in order to make a dictatorship. The purpose of the pursuit is the pursuit. The purpose of torture is torture. The purpose of power is power.

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If you follow the minor rules, you can break the big ones.

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If someone loves you, you love back, and if you can't give them anything else, you can still give love.

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Until they wake up to self-awareness, they will not rebel, and until they have rebelled, they cannot wake up to self-awareness.

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Perhaps one does not so much wish to be loved, but rather to be understood.

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Solitude (...) is a very valuable treasure. Everyone longs for a place where they can be alone from time to time.

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Good people sleep peacefully in their beds at night because tough men are ready to do the violent things for them.

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Ever since we have written records, but probably since the end of the Neolithic period, there have been three types of people in the world: top, middle and bottom. They were classified in many ways, they had countless different names, their number and their relationship to each other changed from era to era; however, the essential structure of society never changed. Even after huge earthquakes and seemingly irreversible changes, the same formula has always been restored, just as a gyroscope always restores its balance, no matter how much it is tilted to one side or the other.

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The essence of war is destruction - not necessarily of human lives, but of the results of human work.

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Revenge is an act that someone wants to commit because they are powerless; but as soon as the feeling of weakness disappears, the desire for revenge also disappears.

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We sink to depths where even the obvious is questioned by an intelligent person.

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The War: Peace. Freedom: Servitude. Ignorance: Strength.

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All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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If every written memory contained the same tale - then the lie entered history and became the truth. He who rules the past, (...) also rules the future; whoever controls the present also controls the past.

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Confession is not betrayal. It doesn't matter what we say or do; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you... that would be the real betrayal.

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They say that time heals, That it is possible to forget - The smiles and tears still Torture my heart.

[Translation not available in English]

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Our most formidable enemy (...) is our own nervous system. The tension in us is ready to transform into some visible symptom at any moment.

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If he thinks he is floating above the floor, and if at the same time I think I see him floating, then it has happened.

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The point is not whether there really is a war, and since a decisive victory is not possible anyway, it is not whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is for there to be a state of war.

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At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

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It's true that everything is always worse when the body gets old, but still: the fact that people are disgusted by the many discomforts, filth and deprivation, by the endless winters, by the fact that their stockings are always sticky, that the elevator never works, the water is cold , the soap is sandy, the cigarettes fall apart, and the food tastes so devilishly bad, isn't that a sign that this is not the natural order of things? How could anyone feel the unbearableness of everything if they had no memory of how things were once different?

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Anyway, how do we know that two plus two is really four? Or how gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in our consciousness, and if our consciousness itself can be regulated - then what is the situation?

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In moments of crisis, a person is never fighting against some external enemy, but always against his own body. (...) This is how it is, he understood, in every seemingly heroic or tragic situation. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on the sinking ship, one always forgets the goals for which one fought, because one's body grows to such an extent that it fills the universe; and even if he is not paralyzed by fear, even if he is not screaming in pain, life is a struggle against hunger, cold, insomnia, stomach acid or toothache at every moment.

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It is undoubtedly possible to imagine a society in which prosperity in the form of personal possessions and comfort items is shared equally by everyone, while power remains in the hands of a small privileged caste. In practice, however, such a society cannot be stable for long. If all enjoy equal comfort and security, the great masses of people, usually dumbed down by poverty, will become educated and learn to think for themselves; and once this has happened, sooner or later they will realize that the privileged minority has no function, and they will sweep it away. Ultimately, a hierarchical society can only be built on poverty and ignorance.

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Nothing is yours except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

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The consequences of every action are inherent in the action itself.

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All of history was a palimpsest that was scratched clean and rewritten as often as necessary.

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Reality is in the skull.

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There is nothing in the world as bad as physical pain. There are no heroes before the color of pain.

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In general: the greater the degree of knowledge, the greater the fraud; the smartest man is the craziest.

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If someone wants to rule and make his rule continuous, he must be able to twist the sense of reality. The secret of ruling is the combination of faith in one's infallibility with the ability to learn from the mistakes of the past.

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The masses never rise up of their own accord, and they never rise up simply because they are oppressed. Until they are allowed to have a measure of comparison, they will never really become aware that they are oppressed.

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With the discovery of television and the fact that the progress of technology made it possible to transmit and receive simultaneously on the same device, privacy came to an end.

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Paradise on Earth lost its credibility at the exact moment it became feasible.

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The best books (...) are those that tell people what they already know.

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Always roaring with the crowd is my watchword. That's the only way to be safe.

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The treacherous human body (...) freezes into helplessness precisely when a special effort is needed.

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There are also great advantages to old age. Man doesn't have so many problems anymore. You don't have to mess with women, and that's a big deal!

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Still, certain kinds of failure are better than others.

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To think, to think, if there is only a fraction of a second left - to think: this is the only hope.

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Everything happens in our brain. What happens in any brain really happens.

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The end was already in the beginning.

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Every joke is a small revolution.

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They put the cemetery here, in the city limits. Have you noticed that this is the custom these days? Every new city puts its graveyard on the edge. Get away with it - let's not even see it! We cannot bear the thought of death. The tombstones also reveal this. They never say that the guy below them is "dead", always "passed away" or "passed away". It wasn't like that a long time ago.

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It's strange what war has done to people. It was as if we were caught by a huge machine. The man did not act of his own free will, but at the same time he had no intention of breaking out of it. If it were not so, no war could last more than three months. The army would simply pack up and go home. Why did I enlist? And why did the other one million idiots enlist before the mandatory military service? Partly for fun, and partly for "England, my England", "reign, Britannia" and other pranks. But how long did it last? Once you were caught by the machine, it did what it wanted with you.

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An individual has power only to the extent that he ceases to be an individual.

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The power lies in tearing human souls to pieces, and then reassembling them into a new shape that we want.

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All wars are justified by the past, but different pasts do not exist. Basically, all wars are designed to keep society on the brink of starvation. War is waged by the dominant group against the subordinate, and its goal is not victory.

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Things have never gone, and they can never go either better or worse - hunger, suffering and disappointment (...) are the immutable laws of life.

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Only when we meet people with cultures different from our own do we realize what our own customs and beliefs are.

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One of the most horrific side effects of war is that the war propaganda, the howling, the masses of lies and hatred all come from people who are not fighting.

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Whatever a person is thinking, even a million other people are thinking the same thing at the time.

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When a woman is dumped, the husband is always the number one suspect - which gives us a little insight into how people really feel about marriage.

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We say you die when your heart stops, not before. It sounds a bit arbitrary. (...) Maybe someone actually dies when their brain shuts down, when they can no longer absorb new thoughts.

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If you want to keep something a secret, you have to keep it from yourself.

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The main characteristic of poverty is that it destroys the future.

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Even technical progress only occurs if its results can somehow be used to reduce human freedom.

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The essence of journalism is to write what no one wants to see in print. Everything else is just propaganda.

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The past is a strange thing. It is with the person all the time, maybe not an hour goes by without him remembering something that happened ten or twenty years ago, mostly he has no sense of reality yet, just a set of learned facts, like a bunch of data in history books. Then a person accidentally sees, hears or smells something, especially smells, which makes him start going back, and the past is no longer recalled in him, but he himself is in the past.

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It is foolish to imagine, as some do, that women only take fat men as a joke. The truth is that women will not marry any man just for fun if he can tell them that he is in love.

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Children are not lyrical at all, they are little beasts, only animals are not a quarter as selfish. Wrestling - that's about as much lyricism as boys have. At the same time, they always have a certain kind of fervor, a power of longing for things that is no longer in a person as an adult, as well as a feeling that the time ahead of them is unlimited and that whatever they do, they can do it indefinitely.

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True happiness (...) comes from hard work and a moderate life.