1949

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 7.7

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 7.4

Letter

Groucho Marx

1949

★ 6.9

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons hitherto brought forward in explanation of this fact has seemed adequate.

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill? He sounds too blue to fly. The midnight train is whinin' low, I'm so lonesome I could cry.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 5.5

Song · Country music

Hank Williams

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry · 1949

★ 5.4

Play

What is hell? Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

T.S. Eliot

1949

★ 5.2

Economical literature · Political literature

Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.

Ludwig von Mises

Human Action: A Treatise on Economics · 1949

★ 5.1

Song · Musical · Great American songbook

You've got to be taught Before it's too late Before you are six, or seven, or eight To hate all the people your relatives hate You've got to be carefully taught.

Rodgers and Hammerstein

1949

★ 5.1

When we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the "division" of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.5

Essay · Nature writing

Aldo Leopold

A Sand County Almanac · 1949

★ 4.4

Film · Film noir · Drama (film) · Drama

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Harry Lime

The Third Man · 1949

★ 4.4

Autobiography and memoir

Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.

Albert Schweitzer

1949

★ 4.2

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

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 4.0

To tell the truth, one is not born a genius: one becomes a genius.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 4.0

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

Personal journal

1949

★ 3.8

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.8

Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.8

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

The Second Sex · 1949

★ 3.8

Letter

Albert Einstein

1949

★ 3.7

Essay

Puritanism—The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H.L. Mencken

1949

★ 3.6

Novel · Detective fiction

A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.

Raymond Chandler

1949

★ 3.6

Treatise · Economic literature

The market economy as such does not respect political frontiers. Its field is the world.

Ludwig von Mises

1949

★ 3.5

Essay · Food writing

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

M.F.K. Fisher

1949

★ 3.5

Essay · Nature writing

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

Aldo Leopold

A Sand County Almanac · 1949

★ 3.5

Essay

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation... Of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

E.B. White

Here is New York · 1949

★ 3.5

Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind.

George Gaylord Simpson

1949

★ 3.5

Sociology

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhautible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Joseph Campbell

1949

★ 3.5

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

"If there is hope," he had written in the diary, "it lies in the proles."

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.2

DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.2

There are only four ways in which a ruling class can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.1

By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.