The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
...On television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound, sacred human activity is...
People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been...
television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a...
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...
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if...
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. {102}
our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them.
Big Brother is Watching You.
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things.
One of those mid -season twilights, when for a moment the air seems to condense in the summer and autumn.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
Ourworld in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became oursanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the citythat...
Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just wouldn't listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn't listen because he...
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-for ever.
She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency.
Whoever we were-and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not-we had become the figment of...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.' So declared Yassi in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly...
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins-I'm sorry, I feel your pain?
Clevinger is a very bright guy, a Harvard man, who knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
After the revolution, almost all the activities one associated with being out in public-seeing movies, listening to music, sharing drinks or a meal with friends-shifted to private homes. It was...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...