14 Quotes by Thomas E Ricks

Collecting the facts is a revolutionary act. Insisting on the right to do so is perhaps the most subversive action possible.

As Orwell once wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” – most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.

If there is anything we can take away from them, it is the wisdom of employing this two-step process, especially in times of mind-bending crisis: Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond.

When there is no coherent strategy, tactics, no matter how flashily executed, become meaningless.

Spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you from enjoying it,” he wrote in April 1946. “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators, nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

Other wartime leaders would do well to imitate his inquisitive approach. They should not look for consensus, and instead should examine differences between advisors, asking them for the reasons for their different views.

One day in the 1950s, one of Churchill’s grandsons poked his head into the old man’s study. Is it true, the child inquired, that you are the greatest man in the world? Churchill, in typical fashion, responded, “Yes, and now bugger off.” The.

Orwell once commented that “whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.

There are eight other instances in the book of Orwell noting the scents of his environment, most of them repugnant. There are two points to be made here. First, sensitivity to odor is a tic of much of his writing. Second, and more unsettling, it is the smell of humanity that repels him. When he notes the smells of nature, even of the barnyard, it is almost always with approval. In contrast, he is always ready to be horrified by mankind.