Facing Unpleasant Facts Quotes

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“...however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back".”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939

“I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles ... There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“Doubtless any horoscope seems "true" if it tells that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“3.6.40: From a letter from Lady Oxford15 to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies: "Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining ... in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels." Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exist.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

“Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies.”
― George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays