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| Quotations by George Orwell |
 Political language and deception - Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.Ordinary men are passive - For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. The plant is blind but it knows enough - The plant is blind but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. Ethics and the sacredness of life - A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. History can include truth - I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. Denial that truth exists - Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists. . . . The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened" -- well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five -- well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs. Liberity to speak - If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. Political language - Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Power is the ends, not means - Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. |
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