Human Nature

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.

"Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself."

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."

"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."

"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head."

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."

"People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word."

"We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight!We're going to live on! We're going to survive!"

You see: "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."

"They make take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!"

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

"The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master."

"I'm a little tired, perhaps, but I feel peaceful. Your success today was, to a small degree, my success. You will live now, secure and safe... You have been my friend. That, in itself, is a tremendous thing. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my own life a trifle... I will not be going back to the barn... I'm done for, Wilbur. In a while, I'll be dead. I haven't even strength enough to climb down into the crate..."

"I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them."

"If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak."

"Well, it's not the men in your life that counts, it's the life in your men."

"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal - that is not the case!...There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems..."

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."

"No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it... All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children."

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."