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…

The first reaction, for the ‘average person’, is to ‘love’ this post.

The ‘normal’ reaction, for the ‘fact-checkers’ among us, is to ask ourselves:

Is this actually true?

Heidegger has something really interesting to say about the subject.
I’m gonna put it succinctly and bluntly.

None of us knows everything about anything. Not even about the most trivial thing.
Because the very nature of our knowledge and of our manner of expressing it – language, none of us is able to ‘put together’ even the simplest ‘absolute’ truth.

Hence, according to Heidegger, we have as many truths as there are people interested on the subject.

‘Then the African Proverb is a ‘lie’?’

Nope.

The African Proverb pictured above is a meta-truth.
Heidegger’s truths, as well as those discussed by Popper, all converge towards the ‘absolute’ one.
As each of the ‘people interested on the subject’ dig deeper, each of them gets closer to the kernel. Probably none of them will ever get exactly ‘there’ but their respective positions will become ever closer.

Meanwhile, there’s nothing like a ‘meta-lie’. As we had ‘truth’ and ‘meta-truth’.
A lie, any lie, is also a meta-truth.

We know – we are under the impression, more exactly, that we’ll never reach ‘the absolute truth’. About any subject, let alone the ‘absolute-absolute’ one. But we can conceive that there is one. Somewhere. At least about individual points of interest.

Do we even have the concept of an absolute lie?
What would that be? How could that even be expressed?

This being the reason for some of us being able to come up with so ‘plausible’ lies.
They put so much truth into their words that it becomes harder and harder for us to notice that the ‘proposed conclusion’ is misleading.

That, in fact, they are lying through their teeth.