... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

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

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.