Quotes About Truth

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

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.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolucionary act.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

TRUTH – It's the New Hate Speech: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" – George Orwell

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.

You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." From Politics and the English Language, not 1984.

In our age there is no such thing as keeping out of politics. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify--that the German, Russian, and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

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

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

A story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.

Even if you are a minority of one it does not make you wrong

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side.