“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”

George Orwell

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“For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.  ”


“The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard...So in the last analysis the champion of progress is also the champion of anachronisms.”


“I said. ‘It seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for nothing from that moment.’‘No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in HERE‘‘—he tapped his forehead—‘and you’re all right.”


“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.”


“They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare the utmost detail of everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”


“He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. . . . Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”