“Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.”
— George Orwell
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”
— George Orwell
“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”
— George Orwell
“The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. ... Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”
— George Orwell
“The essential job is to get people to recognise war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.”
— George Orwell
“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”
— George Orwell
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
— George Orwell
“To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like.”
— George Orwell
“The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom—that is the idea, more or less.”
— George Orwell
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
— George Orwell
“Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.”
— George Orwell
“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 the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had 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’.”
— George Orwell