Animal Farm and 1984

by George Orwell

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.

Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

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

From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

To die hating them, that was freedom.