Kat > Kat's Quotes

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
― Selwyn Duke

“The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy."

..."What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.”
― Helen Exley

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?“

Winston thought. “By making him suffer”, he said.

“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but MORE merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy – everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“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.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”
― Maya Angelou

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.”
― Maya Angelou

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.”
― Pythagoras

“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when we look back everything is different.”
― C.S. Lewis

“To do that successfully, I must have no fear of failure. It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the Master work.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
― Sun Tzu

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other”
― Epictetus

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
― Epictetus

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”
― Epictetus

“First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do.”
― Epictetus

“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master;
he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”
― Epictetus

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy, but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress, but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary.
From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. That is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet a Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be a Socrates.”
― Epictetus (From Manual 51)

“Other people's views and troubles can be contagious. Don't sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.”
― Epictetus

“You are a little soul carrying around a corpse”
― Epictetus

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
― Aristotle

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984