Orwell On Truth

George Orwell, Adam Hochschild

• Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780358065050
• eBook ISBN: 9781328508713
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Over the course of his career, George Orwell wrote about many things, but no matter what he wrote the goal was to get at the fundamental truths of the world. He had no place for dissemblers, liars, conmen, or frauds, and he made his feelings well-known. In Orwell on Truth, excerpts from across Orwell’s career show how his writing and worldview developed over the decades, profoundly shaped by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and further by World War II and the rise of totalitarian states. In a world that seems increasingly like one of Orwell’s dystopias, a willingness to speak truth to power is more important than ever. With Orwell on Truth, readers get a collection of both powerful quotes and the context for them.
 

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Introduction
• ‘The truth about the English and their Empire’
• ‘In England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury, but we would fight to the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen’
• ‘Let’s all get together and have a good hate.’
• ‘It is good history, if mediocre fiction.’
• ‘It is known that the newspapers are habitually untruthful, but it is also known that they cannot tell lies of more than a certain magnitude’
• ‘One of the easiest pastimes in the world is debunking Democracy.’
• ‘Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike’
• ‘Is the English press honest or dishonest?’
• ‘This is the most truthful war that has been fought in modern times.’
• ‘Art and propaganda are never quite separable’
• ‘The first thing that we ask of a writer is that he shan’t tell lies’
• ‘The most one can truly say for Stalin is that probably he is individually sincere’
• ‘One of the worst things about democratic society in the last twenty years has been the difficulty of any straight talking or thinking.’
• ‘All propaganda is lies’
• ‘Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side’
• ‘In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts’
• ‘What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.’
• ‘By making it a penal offence to listen in to Allied broadcasts the Germans have ensured that those broadcasts will be accepted as true.’
• ‘Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history.’
• ‘We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter’
• ‘Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.’
• ‘Indifference to reality.’
• ‘Tactics, comrades, tactics!’
• ‘Doubtless it had been worse in the old days.’
• ‘Sugarcandy Mountain’
• ‘I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm.’
• ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’
• ‘The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.’
• ‘Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set.’
• ‘The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.’
• ‘Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.’
• ‘No book is genuinely free from political bias.’
• ‘A nation gets the newspapers it deserves.’
• ‘WAR IS PEACE’
• ‘When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.’
• ‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.’
• ‘Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.’
• ‘Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
• Coming Soon from George Orwell
• Read More from George Orwell
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes