George Orwell Quotes

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

Yes, academia is often in the brainwashing business and revisionist history is alive and well.

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

I object to teaching of slogans intended to befog the mind, of whatever kind they may be.

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

When your voice contradicts reality and truth, the only way to create space for it is to discredit reality and truth.

The public are not stupid.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

We are in the middle of a big swamp of ignorance that is taught by a lot of nonsense, propaganda, absurdity, amalgams. I have a hard time listening to any speech. You feel like you want to stop the TV every two seconds to rephrase them, because it's lie after lie, turning stuff upside down, and you can't follow that. That's the trap.

'Alternative facts' is really one of the better things that's come out in a long time. 'Alternative facts?' It's brilliant! Really? Alternative facts? There are two different realities?

We are used to politicians bending facts and logic to fit their aims, but the problem goes well beyond political rhetoric. Our larger discourse is dominated by cultural authorities who want us to believe things that the human mind rebels against—that there is no such thing as biological sex, that the way to fight past discrimination is with present discrimination, that not punishing crime is the way to prevent crime, that words can mean whatever they tell us they mean.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

This thing that Colin Powell's son is expected to do is kind of scary when you think that television and radio and newspapers are what make people think what they think.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

When campaigns use one-word labels, typically it's meant to distract and destroy.

Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.

That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened - it's just been intensified.

Society and the system and politicians don't want people to be aware of things. They want people to believe what they have to show 'em.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

We are apt to be deluded into false security by political catchwords, devised to flatter rather than instruct.