It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
- Topic: Freedom, Liberty
- Location: Yellowstone National Park
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from George Orwell
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
More Quotes from Yellowstone National Park
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All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: "This is my country."
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace, and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.
For friendship, like freedom, must be tended.
Freedom ultimately means the right of the other people to do things you don’t approve of.
When even one American, who has done nothing wrong, is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
True success, true wealth, does not come out of the barrel of a gun.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
To a greater force, and to a better nature, you, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in you, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought.
What I wanted was to be allowed to do the thing in the world that I did best, which I believed then and believe now, is the greatest privilege there is. When I did that, success found me.
The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants.
The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.
A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.
The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary rule of another man.
It is a socialist idea making profits is a vice. I consider the real vice is making losses.
I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.
