If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable � what then?


George Orwell

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Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
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No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
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War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
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A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
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The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality...
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One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
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At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
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Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually l...
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If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a cr...
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exha...
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Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
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War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
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Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
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Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
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Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
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It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequentl...
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The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
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I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corpora...
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Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
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It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one...
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War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses t...
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Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay egg...
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Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defen...
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What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments ...
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Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of...
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Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of al...
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I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
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I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
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There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one si...
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Big Brother is watching you.
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
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Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
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If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
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Good writing is like a windowpane.
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For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
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As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
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A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing ...
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One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in ...
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To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than othe...
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War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit f...
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All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are ...
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The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
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When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do ...
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I admit, too, that I felt a kind of horror as I looked at the people I was marching among. You canno...
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Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
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The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes
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It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over y...
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It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. Y...
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Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out i...
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All animals are equalBut some animals are more equal than others
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WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
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So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that f...
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Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was ...
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In the face of pain there are no heroes.
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If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
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Lo que opinen o dejen de opinar las masas se considera falto de importancia. Se les puede conceder l...
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To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructe...
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The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would yo...
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During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
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The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is ...
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The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel ...
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A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayone...
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A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? ...
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All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writ...
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For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
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I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
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The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one'...
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All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect c...
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Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
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In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
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Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
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We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
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He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
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The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their ...
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War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
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Four legs good, two legs bad.
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The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but al...
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The only good human being is a dead one.
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Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted...
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If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
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Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
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The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies ...
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Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
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The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from ...
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People have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't really accept you as o...
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The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to co...
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Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
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He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
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A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
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Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good ac...
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To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever wri...
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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's d...
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For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or ...
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He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personal...
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The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to t...
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To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
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To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
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The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always...
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History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
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On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
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Power is not a means; it is an end....
Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creat...
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We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
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One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the ...
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Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
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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 girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement...
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To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civi...
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Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, ...
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Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by ...
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By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
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Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
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You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those wh...
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Kipling sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilise...
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Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
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Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quie...
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Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight ...
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Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only ...
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Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser th...
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On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.
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Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
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Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give ...
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's d...
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We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent...
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An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a goo...
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As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents
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Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only ...
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Minds are like parachutes-- they only function when open. Thomas Dewar "Doublethink" means the pow...
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Insanity is my only means of relaxation
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Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser t...
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For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
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Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a re...
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Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
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A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
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The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded
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Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only ...
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But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the ...
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Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an app...
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Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
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For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or th...
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The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Lov...
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one...
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No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equali...
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, a...
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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the futu...
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Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
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We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men...
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War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
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The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
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There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
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Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
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Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a re...
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Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, ...
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Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
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As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
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We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we be...
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Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improve...
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Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
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Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which i...
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Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
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All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
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Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
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If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
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Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser t...
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The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
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England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicte...
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For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story...
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She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed
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The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally.
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Todos los animales son iguales, pero algunos son más iguales que otros.
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Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their b...
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People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on t...
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He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personal...
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The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and inte...
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Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
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Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physi...
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