It was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.
It was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.
- Topic: Society, Truth
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Anais Nin
I must be a mermaid, I have no fear of depths, and a great fear of shallow living.
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
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The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?
Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… The one absolutely certain way of brining this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
Fundamentally, there are only to ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion — the technique of the army and the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation — the technique of the marketplace.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Almost every significant breakthrough is the result of a courageous break with traditional ways of thinking.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
Everything you said should be true but not everything true should be said.
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If all people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.
The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.
If you can't find the truth right where you are, where else do you think you will find it.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.
