Giulia > Giulia's Quotes

“Winston: I don't know - I don't care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.

O'Brian: We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside - irrelevant.

Winston: I don't care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces.

O'Brian: Do you see any evidence that this is happening? Or any reason why it should?

Winston: No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe - I don't know, some spirit, some principle - that you will never overcome.

O'Brian: Do you believe in God, Winston?

Winston: No.

O'Brian: Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?

Winston: I don't know. The spirit of Man.

O'Brian: And do you consider yourself a man?

Winston: Yes.

O'Brian: If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent.

His manner changed and he said more harshly:

"'And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?'"

Winston: Yes, I consider myself superior.

"'...You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human spirit...”
― George Orwell, 1984

“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim MORRISON

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“A fleeting second on someone's news feed,
No dearth of meanings for those who read,
Not my stories but 'tis what I think,
I say I don't write poems, I just write dreams.”
― Sanhita Baruah

“To all the boys, for when you become men: you'll leave women all throughout your life because they're holding you back, and even after she's gone she'll still weigh you down. To all the women: stay away from us men. We don't know anything about you, despite what we try to convince you of.”
― Dave Matthes, Paradise City

“A love poem about the most invisible woman:

The perfect mind, the perfect cover.
I knew her, like… there was no other.
No, I will never, her, forget.
In pure blood - these words are set.
She walks alone now, in my dreams,
where no is never, so it seems.
The night is dark, and near the hour –
to plant a tree, where roses flower.
And then, again, again, once more,
Till hidden is what I adore.
Her heart was pure, and also kind,
And I… should not have acted blind.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.”
― Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

“A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.”
― W.H. Auden

“What many people do not know is that being a non-Muslim reporter did not complicate those poor victims situation. It does not matter whether you are Muslim, Arab or civilian; as long as you disagree with ISIS, your “rightful” punishment would be death!”
― M. J. ALOHMAYED, Dismantling ISIS

“. . . the press and the pulpit have in every age and every nation been on the side of the exploiting class and the ruling class.”
― Eugene V. Debs

“No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.”
― Claude Adrien Helvetius, Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties and His Education V1

“Mr. Orage, one of the most active and intelligent reformers for the last generation in England, attempted this very thing. He, in his little intellectual review which was supported by so brilliant a group of writers for so many years, published week after week the ingredients of the English patent medicines and the cost of those ingredients. Not a single one of the newspapers followed suit, or dared publish so much as the fact that Orage was thus acting courageously in his own limited sphere for the public good.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets..”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
― Edward Snowden

“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Freedom of the Press,
if it means anything at all,
means the freedom
to criticize and oppose”
― George Orwell