"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
George Orwell.

what wisdom... great quote!

Orwell is a genius

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...I don't wear a tin foil hat!

A GREAT book! Everyone on this board should read it! Orwell was WAY ahead of his time: Political Correctness IS "Newspeak"!

MMMMM This thread is Double plus good!!

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George Orwell...For a man who was so attuned to the corruption of the government, he was way ahead of his time. I think that 1984 was a very good prediction of the future, but I do believe that he was off by a few years. I also enjoyed the book entitled "Animal Farm", which too was written with a view into the future. Who would have thunk it, George Orwell the profit. Watch out Nostradamus!

That's somebody's sig line here, but for the life of me, I can't think of whose........

I hate to be the one to pee in everyone's Wheaties, but this quote is apparently a myth. It doesn't seem to appear in print anywhere — at least anywhere that can be accessed with an internet search engine.

The closest printed variant is contained in Orwell’s essay on Rudyard Kipling (1942): "[Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them."

However, here's another quote that seems to be valid:

"Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak." — George Orwell, You and the Atom Bomb, 1945

Aparently this was a spoken quote, and not one that was in print. There are multiple sites that refer to this quote. Besides, this is the intraweb, how could it be wrong? [:D]

A couple of other great Orwell quotes:

"A humanitarian is always a hypocrite."

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

"Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you." - 1984

"I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."

"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. "

"All the evils of this life of ours springs from the tyranny of human beings." -Animal Farm

"Rich people are poor people with money. "