Gabriel Garcia Marquez Quotes

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.

It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.

The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them. Life will descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism, and the world will be better for it.....

In the internment camp, there was nothing to do.

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.

Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. –The Grand Inquisitor

Servitude debases men to the point where they end up liking it.

In Prison Wearily, drearily, Half the day long, Flap the great banners High over the stone; Strangely and eerily Sounds the wind's song, Bending the banner-poles. While, all alone, Watching the loophole's spark, Lie I, with life all dark, Feet tethered, hands fettered Fast to the stone, The grim walls, square lettered With prisoned men's groan. Still strain the banner-poles Through the wind's song, Westward the banner rolls Over my wrong.

Gemma, you see how it is. They've planned our entire lives, from what we shall wear to whom we shall marry and where we shall live. It's one lump of sugar in your tea whether you like it or not and you'd best smile even if you're dying deep inside. We're like pretty horses, and just as on horses, they mean to put blinders on us so we can't look left or right but only straight ahead where they would lead. Please, please, please, Gemma, let's not die inside before we have to.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

What we call education is nothing but domestication of the human being.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

I go in solitude, so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think; after a time it always seems as if they want to banish myself from myself and rob me of my soul.

Captivity is the greatest of all evils that can befall one.

I am kept in bondage by the moles of my beloved.

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible

The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone.