Language is the tool we use to convey information.
To speak our minds…

The consequences of tool use – messages, in this case – depend on the yielder.
The consequences of shooting a gun depend mainly on the person aiming the gun.
The consequences of using language … depend on those who are at the both ends of the ‘barrel’.

Messages – consequences of language being used to put together batches of information with the intent of transmitting them to an audience – are interpreted as soon as they reach their ‘target’.
Meaning – what the receptor makes of a message, using the same languaging tools as those put to work by the emitter – depends mainly on the receptor. In fact, most of the times, there’s more information to be gleaned from a message than that intended to be conveyed by the person initiating the exchange.

The text attributed to Orwell is too simplistic and too misleading to had been penned by Orwell.
Hence Google…
“There is no substantive evidence that George Orwell who died in 1950 made this remark. The earliest known matching statement appeared in a column in the Washington Times newspaper written by the film critic and essayist Richard Grenier in 1993“

If interested in who said what and what Orwell thought about the subject… just click on the link above.
I’ll only add the reasons for which I know it to be a misleading affirmation.

The factual truth is that only dictators need to be guarded by rough men during their sleep. And during the rest of their lives…
We, the rest of ‘the people’, go to sleep at night knowing there’s only a very slim chance to be targeted by thieves. Yes, we know that the police will likely come to investigate after the fact. After the fact…
But we also know that we are less likely to fall prey to violence than those living in other countries because our societies work better than those which are more violent than ours.

Because our society works better, not because we employ more ‘rough men’ to guard us…
On the contrary!
The more violent a country, the more ‘popular’ the ‘rough men’ are. On both ‘sides of the isle’!

And the more violent a country, the less peacefully people sleep in that country…

I’ve been an avid reader all my life.

Libraries, book shops – new and second hand, used to be my home away from home.

Communism crumbling under it’s own weight in my home country, Romania, widened even more my already special relationship with the written word.
Books nobody would even had dared to dream about got translated into Romanian.
Or even got imported in original.

As borders became more and more open, I’ve also ‘imported’ some myself.

The honeymoon lasted for a while.
Only at some point I was no longer ‘comfortable’ in most bookshops. If anything, there was ‘too much of it’. Too much of the good stuff, to much ‘noise’… Not enough time to read everything I would have liked to… so I gave up.
I gave up compulsively visiting book shops, not reading…

Then, in 2007, something happened.
“Anthony Frost English Bookshop” happened.

“A real place hosting literature, arts, non-fiction and comic books from all around the world.“

The really special thing about it?
There was no ‘noise’ in there!
None of the books I’d found on its shelves ever seemed ‘out of place’. Most of them, of course, were of little – if any at all, interest for me. Yet they seemed worthwhile, if you understand what I mean.

The good thing lasted for almost 10 years.

At some point I found a ‘closing soon’ placard hanging on the door.
I didn’t even enter that day. Too sad.

I can’t say I’d given up visiting book shops.
Only that I had stopped doing it with gusto.
And, certainly, that I had given up perusing book store shelves.

I’d started to rely of friends ‘telling’ me what to read.
Real life friends, Facebook friends… you name it.

And I continued to do it.
Only my scope had become nearer and nearer.
Without even realizing what was going on….

Until a good friend of mine – a real life friend, told me – on Facebook, that Anthony Frost was alive and kicking!

Hiding behind a different name, a few hundreds meters from the old place, but the very same thing.
A rather small location full to the brink with the good stuff!

Visiting it, and perusing its shelves, I realized – with a shudder, that my intellectual bubble had shrunk.
Became ‘deeper’ – debatable, but certainly narrower!

Go find your own books!

Anthony Frost, in Bucharest, is a good place to start!
Or to rekindle your love affair with the printed word.