# Quote — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

> He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook which he had borrowed from Mrs Parsons, and began copying a passage into the diary: In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists.

- Author: [George Orwell](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell.md)
- Book: [Nineteen Eighty-Four](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/nineteen-eighty-four.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Chapter_7) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/nineteen-eighty-four/he-took-out

## More from this book

> We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/nineteen-eighty-four/we-know-that.md)

> "Sometimes," she said, "they threaten you with something — something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, 'Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/nineteen-eighty-four/sometimes-she-said.md)

> Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/nineteen-eighty-four/stupidity-was-as-necessary.md)