Films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
- Topic: Truth
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from George Orwell
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.”
They fear love because it creates a world they can't control.
It's frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
It is frightful that people who are so ignorant should have so much influence.
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
More on Truth
Without properly kept accounts it is impossible to maintain truth in its pristine purity.
The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Never was a government that was not composed of liars, malefactors and thieves.
The liar is no better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.
Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
The greatest kindness one can render to any man is leading him to truth.
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.