The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionar...
What a mess, [Rubashov] said, what a mess we have made of our golden age.Ivanov smiled. Maybe, he said happily. Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris. Up to now, all revolutions...
The sole object of revolution was the abolition of senseless suffering. But it had turned out that the removal of this second kind of suffering was only possible at the price of a temporary enormous i...
The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.
The Copernican system was not a truly heliocentric one; it was a vacuo-centric system, so to speak.
Perhaps he did not know himself - like all these intellectual cynics...
Leaving controversial issues aside, the first and main purpose of this book may be summed up by a phrase of Laplace: If we were able to make an exact catalogue of all particles and forces which are ac...
It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him,six and a half steps to the window, behind wh...
Hay dos clases de valentía: la del valiente y la del cobarde
En la ecuación social, el valor de una sola vida es cero; en la ecuación cósmica, es infinito.
Courage is never letting your actions be influenced by your fears.
Οι άνθρωποι δεν είναι συνέχεια δυστυχισμένοι παρά μόνο στα κακά μυθιστορήματα· στην πραγματικότητα είναι πολύ απασχολημένοι.
The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one’s fingers.
The cause of the Party’s defectiveness must be found. All our principles were right, but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic ex...
Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of...
I merely wish to point out that some of the major break-throughs in the history of science represent such dramatic tours de force, that 'ripeness' seems a very lame explanation, and 'chance' no explan...
Generally speaking, words like 'agent of,' 'Democracy,' 'Freedom,' etc. meant something quite different in Party usage from what they meant in general usage; and as, furthermore, even their Party mean...
For Pythagoras as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing : to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time.
The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in all his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic of living organisms-in other words, the fact that the mole...