However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
- Topic: Common Sense, Intelligence, Leadership, Sacrifice
- Location: Lake Mead, Redstone
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from George Orwell
It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
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.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
Films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
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.”
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Common sense is the very antipodes of science.
Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
People all over the nation are starved for honesty and common sense.
A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.
Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words
Look at the stars and not down at your own feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
In walking, the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and performing their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.
I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
I have always regarded that Constitution as the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.
Intelligent people tend to have less friends than the average person. The smarter you are, the more selective you become.
It doesn't matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.
If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.
Do not think that what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; but if a thing is humanly possible, consider it to be within your reach.
Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.
If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences.
Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
