# Quote — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

> How could you tell how much of it was lies? It MIGHT be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.

- 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/how-could-you

## 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)