ELLEN GOODMAN QUOTES

“The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.”

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

“We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic.”

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“Until they became conscious, they will never rebel. Until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.”

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words: it is war minus the shooting.”

“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” QUOTES ABOUT CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

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

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

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

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

“In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four.”

“The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”

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

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

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

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”