"Is the English press honest or dishonest?..." - Quote by George Orwell
Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.
More by George Orwell
“What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.”
“Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.”
“She was very young...she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.”
More on Media
“Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.”
“I don't like anything unsigned in a newspaper that purports to be the opinion of some group if we don't know who the group is. It's laughable to say that The Miami Herald's editorials or any newspaper's editorials represent any views other than those of the people writing them, so why don't we tell everybody who they are?”
“Television is where you watch people in your living room that you would not want near your house.”
More on Honesty
“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”
“Sir, I am not a brave man...The truth is, I am an utter craven coward. I have never been within the sound of gunshot or in sight of battle in my whole life that I wasn't so scared that I had sweat in the palms of my hands.”
“I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it... The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.”