Mira B. > Mira's Quotes

“Emma was just like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and the same language.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“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.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
― George Orwell

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“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.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
― George Orwell

“The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
― George Orwell

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”
― George Orwell, The Lost Orwell: Being a Supplement to The Complete Works of George Orwell

“Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.”
― George Orwell

“The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here...”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet