"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
The quotation on this poster comes from the unused preface to George Orwell's 1945 novella Animal Farm.
The quotation appears on the wall behind a statue of George Orwell by the British sculptor Martin Jennings, outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC, in London.
In his lifetime, Orwell wrote six novels and hundreds of articles, the most celebrated being Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. A democratic socialist, he was deeply opposed to totalitarianism and aware of social injustice, as reflected in his works. His writing remains as pertinent today as it did when he was alive. ‘Orwellian’ is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian; ‘Big Brother’ (the totalitarian ruler from Orwell's novel Nineteen-eighty-four novel) has been the inspiration and title for a widely-known reality TV program for 20 years; and ‘Newspeak’… well, see the ongoing attempts to spread ‘alternative facts’.
