Quotes to inspire and reflect

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

There is a great danger that [the Internet] becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great—a little understood thing.

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.

One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician’s objective. Election and power are.

And if, to be sure, sometimes you need to conceal a fact with words, do it in such a way that it does not become known, or, if it does become known, that you have a ready and quick defence.

Man’s mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended.

Every communist has a fascist frown, every fascist a communist smile.

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please—you can never have both.

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is and to tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and live with the truth. That’s what we’ll do.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

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 truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.

The ability to discriminate between that which is true and that which is false is one of the last attainments of the human mind.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.

Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself.

He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, ‘Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they sit down they do not know what they have said.’

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.

I think if the people of this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, as against the privileged few.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line—no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.

When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.