George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 - January 21, 1950)
"1984" Written in 1948, first titled it "The Last Man In Europe". At the time lived in Jura Scotland.
Big brother is watching you.
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
William Shakespeare
Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.
Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.
Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.
Everyone ought to bear patiently the results of his own conduct.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.
Mark Twain
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Aristotle
Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.
It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.
Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.
Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.
Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
The law is reason, free from passion.
The soul never thinks without a picture.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
Plato
Courage is knowing what not to fear.
Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
It is right to give every man his due.
Knowledge is true opinion.
Love is a serious mental disease.
Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.
Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.
Necessity... the mother of invention.
Aesop
Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.
Appearances often are deceiving.
A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction.
The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Charles Dickens
If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.
Martin Luther King Jr.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.
When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
Bette Davis
An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring... I ought to know.
Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
Everybody has a heart. Except some people.
Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night!
I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and ofttimes disagreeable... I suppose I'm larger than life.
I sent my flowers across the hall to Mrs. Nixon but her husband remembered what a Democrat I am and sent them back.
I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year.
If you've never been hated by your child, you've never been a parent.
Old age is no place for sissies.
Sex is God's joke on human beings.
Strong women only marry weak men.
The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies.
Today everyone is a star - they're all billed as 'starring' or 'also starring'. In my day, we earned that recognition.
Sir Winston Churchill
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.
Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
If I was your wife Sir, I'd poison you!
Madam, if you were my wife, I'd let you!
If you are going through hell, keep going.
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.
In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.
My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.
Lord John Acton
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh.
When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil.
When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.
There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.
Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.
Oscar Wilde
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
I like talking to a brick wall, it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me.
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
George Washington
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
John Adams
The happiness of society is the end of government.
Fear is the foundation of most governments.
Thomas Jefferson
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.
When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, count a hundred.
The selfish spirit of commerce, which knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.
I have not observed men's honesty to increase with their riches.
Abraham Lincoln
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
Woodrow Wilson
When I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities.
Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Harry Truman
The buck stops here.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
If you can't convince them, confuse them.
If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference.
John F. Kennedy
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.
Lyndon Johnson
The world has narrowed to a neighborhood before it has broadened to brotherhood.
Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.
A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face.
Richard Nixon
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
I played by the rules of politics as I found them.
Always remember, others may hate you. Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.
Jimmy Carter
I have looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God forgives me for it.
A simple and proper function of government is just to make it easy for us to do good and difficult for us to do wrong.
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
Ronald Reagan
You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jelly beans.
Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.
Status quo, you know, that is Latin for "the mess we're in."
Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere.
Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.
George H. W. Bush
War is never cheap or easy.
I have opinions of my own--strong opinions--but I don't always agree with them.
A time of historic change is no time for recklessness.
George W. Bush
CNBC October 24, 2006
One of the things I've used on the Google is to pull up maps. It's very interesting to see -- I've forgot the name of the program -- but you get the satellite, and you can... like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.
NBC August 29, 2006
I said I was looking for a book to read, Laura said you ought to try Camus. I also read three Shakespeares. ... I've got a eck-a-lec-tic reading list.
An exchange with legally blind reporter Peter Wallsten, to whom Bush later apologized, Washington, D.C., June 14, 2006
President Bush: "Peter. Are you going to ask that question with shades on?"
Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times: "I can take them off."
Bush: "I'm interested in the shade look, seriously."
Wallsten: "All right, I'll keep it, then."
Bush: "For the viewers, there's no sun."
Wallsten: "I guess it depends on your perspective."
Bush: "Touche".
George W. Bush, while showing German newspaper reporter Kai Diekmann the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2006
"That's George Washington, the first president, of course. The interesting thing about him is that I read three -- three or four books about him last year. Isn't that interesting?"
George W. Bush, showing German newspaper reporter Kai Diekmann the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2006
"That's called, A Charge To Keep, based upon a religious hymn. The hymn talks about serving God. The president's job is never to promote a religion."
George W. Bush, Washington, D.C. April 18, 2006
"I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense."
George W. Bush, San Jose, Calif., April 21, 2006
"I aim to be a competitive nation."
George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Feb. 1, 2006
"I like my buddies from west Texas. I liked them when I was young, I liked them then I was middle-age, I liked them before I was president, and I like them during president, and I like them after president."
Washington Dinner, March 2001
You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.
Germaine Greer
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It has no mother.
I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.
The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.
There have been women in the past far more daring than we would need to be now, who ventured all and gained a little, but survived after all.
There is no such thing as security. There never has been.
You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.
Kin Hubbard
We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate.
Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.
Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid.
David Lloyd George
A politician is a person with whose politics you don't agree; if you agree with him he's a statesman.
Pat Nixon
Being First Lady is the hardest unpaid job in the world.
I have sacrificed everything in my life that I consider precious in order to advance the political career of my husband.
Karl Rove
Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
Will Rogers
Everything is changing. People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.
John Kerry
I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.
David Borenstein
Bush Sr. was a jerk, Quayle an idiot, Clinton was atrocious and disgusting, most of those who persecuted him were hypocritical, Gore is shallow and weak, Bradley is an idealist, Bush Jr. a fool, and all of the independent candidates act like they're on drugs.
