Churchill and Orwell Quotes

“Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him—products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“As Orwell once wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”—most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“When there is no coherent strategy, tactics, no matter how flashily executed, become meaningless.”
― Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Other wartime leaders would do well to imitate his inquisitive approach. They should not look for consensus, and instead should examine differences between advisors, asking them for the reasons for their different views.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“One day in the 1950s, one of Churchill’s grandsons poked his head into the old man’s study. Is it true, the child inquired, that you are the greatest man in the world? Churchill, in typical fashion, responded, “Yes, and now bugger off.” The”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Churchill, sensitive to class considerations in his conduct of the war, instructed his generals and admirals to be careful in how they governed the armed forces. Early on, he warned the navy to be “particularly careful that class prejudice does not enter into these decisions” about selection of cadets for officer training at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. “Unless some better reasons are given to me,” he vowed, he would investigate the matter. The navy resisted this direction, so he did as promised and intervened directly. He even met with some of the candidates who had scored well on entrance examinations but had still been rejected. “I have seen the three candidates,” he informed the navy’s top officers. “It is quite true that A has a slightly cockney accent, and that the other two are the sons of a chief petty officer and an engineer in the merchant service. But the whole intention of competitive examination is to open the service to ability, irrespective of class or fortune.” Concluding that an injustice had been done, he ordered that the three be admitted to officer training. This was a lot of effort for someone trying to run a war and stave off invasion.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Orwell depicts the proletarians as essentially uncontrollable. The state does not try to control them as much as it simply distracts them.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Political language . . . is designed to make its lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“is clear now that appeasement rested more on self-delusion than on rational calculation, because it necessarily required faith in Hitler’s sanity and trustworthiness.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Orwell once commented that “whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”
― Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“The second driver of the current Orwell boom is the post-9/11 rise of the intelligence state.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“the theme that runs powerfully through all of Orwell’s writings, from his early work on Burmese Days through the late 1930s and then through the great essays, and into Animal Farm and 1984, is the abuse of power in the modern world by both the left and the right.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Essentially these books consist of asking the reader to forget about the forest of Churchill’s life and instead focus on a few trees that a given writer believes deserve more attention”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Most of all, he would have been alienated by America’s determined, self-centered individualism”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Collecting the facts is a revolutionary act. Insisting on the right to do so is perhaps the most subversive action possible”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“If there is anything we can take away from them, it is the wisdom of employing this two-step process, especially in times of mind-bending crisis: Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond.”
― Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

“Fidel Castro disclosed that he was reading Churchill’s World War II memoirs. “If Churchill hadn’t done what he did to defeat the Nazis, you wouldn’t be here, none of us would be here,” he told a crowd that had gathered to see the new Cuban leader when he visited a Havana bookstore. “What is more, we have to take a special interest in him because he, too, led a little island against a great enemy.” Another surprising fan”
― Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”
― Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

“George Lansbury, an aging Labour Party official, backed up the Conservative PM by telling the House, “I hear all this denunciation of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini. I have met both of them, and can only say that they are very much like any other politician or diplomat one meets.”
― Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

“In most places and most of the time, liberty is not a product of military action. Rather, it is something alive that grows or diminishes every day, in how we think and communicate, how we treat each other in our public discourse, in what we value and reward as a society, and how we do that. Churchill and Orwell showed us the way.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“There are eight other instances in the book of Orwell noting the scents of his environment, most of them repugnant. There are two points to be made here. First, sensitivity to odor is a tic of much of his writing. Second, and more unsettling, it is the smell of humanity that repels him. When he notes the smells of nature, even of the barnyard, it is almost always with approval. In contrast, he is always ready to be horrified by mankind.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Indeed, after the war, German commanders being debriefed confirmed that they had been ordered to stop about eight miles outside Dunkirk. “My tanks were kept halted there for three days,” said Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. “If I had had my way the English would not have got off so lightly. But my hands were tied by direct orders from Hitler himself.” When one of Rundstedt’s subordinate generals told Hitler in a small meeting that he did not understand why such an order was issued, Hitler replied that “his aim was to make peace with Britain on a basis that she would regard as compatible with her honour to accept.” However,”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you from enjoying it,” he wrote in April 1946. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators, nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell

“Another surprising fan mention came from Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones, who defended his dissipated lifestyle by correctly citing Churchill’s comment, “I’ve taken a lot more out of alcohol than it’s ever taken out of me.”
― Thomas E Ricks, Churchill and Orwell