Others

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.

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.

Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?

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.

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

A genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

A genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.

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

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.

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

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

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged. God has kept that good wine until now.

There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

Silence is all the genius a fool has.

Silence is all the genius a fool has.

A learned fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit.

To be intimate with a foolish friend is like going to bed to a razor.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.