"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it."
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Quote collection
George Orwell quotes (page 1 of 39)
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"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
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"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
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"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."
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"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth."
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"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
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"All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force."
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"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right."
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"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."
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"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."
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"It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence."
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"All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."
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"That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
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"A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."
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"Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past."
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"Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen."
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"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
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"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
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"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right."
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"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."
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