"Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear" George Orwell June 26, 2022 – Posted in: Books – Tags: book
Prophetic, thinker, anatomist of human behavior, talented, intelligent, more relevant than ever. Eric Arthur Blair (Eric Arthur Blair), born June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950), better known by his pen name (George Orwell) George Orwell, was a British writer, literary critic and journalist. His work is characterized by clear prose, awareness of social inequalities, opposition to totalitarian regimes and commitment to democratic socialism.
He is often ranked as one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century and one of the most influential chroniclers of English culture of his generation. Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, novels, and polemics. He is famous for the dystopian novel 1984 (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). His book Honor Tax in Catalonia (1938), a record of his experiences of the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on political, literary, linguistic and cultural issues. In 2008, The Times ranked him second in its list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945".
Orwell's work continues to influence mass and political culture, and the term Orwellian, descriptive of totalitarian and absolutist practices, has entered the vocabulary along with several of his neologisms, including the following: Cold War, Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, Doublethink and Thoughtcrime.
Since Orwell, in fact, the adjective Orwellian has been created to describe a state of affairs that the author identified as destructive to the well-being of a free and open society. It is characterized by draconian control through propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of the truth and authoritarian policies. Often, this includes situations described in the 1984 book.
The New York Times has labeled the term "the most widely used epithet derived from the name of a modern writer".
On the occasion of the anniversary of his birth, we remember some of his characteristic phrases:
"People sleep soundly in their beds at night only because hard men are ready to commit violence on their behalf."
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stepping on a human face – forever."
"The very concept of objective truth is fading from the world. The lies will go down in history."
"Freedom is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear."
"Political language ... is designed to make lies sound true and murder respectable and give a sturdy appearance to the fresh air."
"Each generation imagines itself to be smarter than the one before it and wiser than the one that followed."
"All the war propaganda, all the shouting, the lies and the hatred, always come from people who are not fighting."
"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to preserve a revolution. One makes the revolution to establish the dictatorship".
"Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. It doesn't give milk, it doesn't lay eggs, it's too weak to pull the plow, it can't run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is the lord of all animals.'
"We may find in the long run that canned food is a deadlier weapon than a machine gun."
"In our time, there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics". All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, stupidity, hatred and schizophrenia."
"Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be."
"Sometimes the first task of intelligent people is to restate the obvious."
"So much of leftist thinking is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know fire is hot."
"Whoever controls the past also controls the future. Whoever controls the present also controls the past."
"Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and always disappointing."
"Championship is not about fair play. It is associated with hatred, jealousy, boasting, breaking all rules and sadistic pleasure in seeing violence. In other words, it's war without the shooting."
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is power."
"Men can only be happy when they do not suppose that the object of life is happiness."
"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe them."
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
"I'm fat, but I'm thin inside...there's a thin man inside every fat man."
"War against a foreign country is only waged when the financial classes believe they will benefit from it."
"What can you do against the madman who is smarter than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then just persists in his madness?"
"The myths you believe in tend to come true."
"Most people get enough fun out of life, but on balance life is a hassle, and only the very young or the very stupid imagine otherwise."
"To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you must get dirty."
"The best books... are the ones that tell you what you already know."
"The great enemy of pure language is insincerity. When there is a gap between his real and stated aims, he instinctively turns, as it were, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spewing ink.'
"A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it still feels that man is nobler than the forces that destroy him."
"In general, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not all the time."
"Whoever wins this moment will always feel invincible."
"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a maniacal murderer."
