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Facts Quotes by George Orwell

37 Facts quotes by George Orwell

All Facts quotes George Orwell’s page

George Orwell shows how people can cling to false ideas and then twist facts when proved wrong. He warns that editors and national pride can hide or bend truth, and that fancy language often clouds real details. For him, confronting plain facts is a way to avoid deception.

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“Traditions are not killed by facts.”

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“A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...”

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“Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.”

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If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true,…

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If one harbors anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true,…

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At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable…

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“I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created…

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The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's…

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The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring…

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When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of…

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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides…

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The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as…

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We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently…

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The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means…

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I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union…

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Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of…

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I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very…

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In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced,…

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No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that…

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England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt…

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All people who have reached the point of becoming nations tend to despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the…

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But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees,…

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The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a…

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Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you,…

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I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about…

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Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that…

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Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to you,…

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A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The…

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“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue; and then, when we are…

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The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also…

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If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution…

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For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications…

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Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its…

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The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set…

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While the game of deadlocks and bottle-necks goes on, another more serious game is also being played. It is governed by two…

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There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling…

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The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of…

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It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was…

“The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running…

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the…

“if you took 1 Corinthians, chapter thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'charity', the chapter had ten times as much meaning…

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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…

“Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through…

“But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Whatever the Party holds to…

“And the people under the sky were also very much the same...everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just…

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally…

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to…

And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at…

“Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.…