Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)
Context: Get up in one of our industrial centres today and say that two and two make four, and if there is any financial interest concerned in maintaining that two and two make five, the police will bash your head in. Then what choice have you, save to degenerate either into a fool or into a hypocrite? And who wants to live in a land of fools and hypocrites?
“In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.”
Source: 1984
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George Orwell 473
English author and journalist 1903–1950Related quotes
Whistler v. Ruskin
posthumous published
Four Saints in Three Acts (1927)
Operas and Plays (1932)
“Even God cannot make two times two not make four.”
As quoted in Delbert D. Thiessen (ed.), A Sociobiology Compendium: Aphorisms, Sayings, Asides, p. 18
Interview in Speaking Frankly by Wendy Leigh (London: Muller, 1978).
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
Variant: Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Source: 1984
" What is Justice? https://books.google.com/books?id=ydBvl65e9qcC&pg=PA1", ch. 1 of Concepts of Justice (Oxford, England; Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 2.