However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
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.
- Topic: Leadership, Society, Truth
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from George Orwell
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.
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
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.”
Films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
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Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely enjoy exercising authority usually lose it.
This is the thing that I was born to do.
The heights by great men reached and kept Where not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.
There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
But what is happiness except for the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.
What makes night within us may leave stars.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
You cannot possibly have a broader basis for any government than that which includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights.
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
The higher you soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.
I propose to raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly of the truth.
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… The one absolutely certain way of brining this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?
The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance.
Without properly kept accounts it is impossible to maintain truth in its pristine purity.
Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.
False leaders create followers by lying.
But all my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise.
And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.
I have met men who are habitual liars. They have lied so long that they no longer can distinguish between the truth and a lie. Their sensitivity to sin has been almost completely deadened.