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.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
- Topic: Truth
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from George Orwell
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
They fear love because it creates a world they can't control.
It is frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
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.
More on Truth
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
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.
None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
