Others

Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself.

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.

I think if the people of this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, as against the privileged few.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

True greatness is free, kind, familiar, and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

Gossip is the art-form of the man and woman in the street, and the proper subject for gossip, as for all art, is the behavior of mankind.

A genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

A genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

What is genius—but the power of expressing a new individuality?

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.