In 1898 French conservative-turned-socialist Jean Jaurès said, “When a society, when an institution, lives only by lies, truth is revolutionary.” He was speaking with reference to the ongoing Dreyfus Affair. The statement is quoted in Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (2010), p. 262. (She cites Le petit Meridional, 3 July 1898, as the original source.) This seems very close in spirit and in phrasing to the pseudo-Orwell quotation. (The cumulative index to the many volumes of Orwell’s writing compiled and edited by Peter Davison does not reveal any direct references to Jaurès or the Dreyfus Affair.)
The revised version of the above quote was attributed to George Orwell in State of Fear (2004) by Michael Crichton, and Picking Fights with Thunderstorms (2005) by Sheila Suess Kennedy.
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
It has been attributed to Orwell thousands of times since these 2004 and 2005 books. No source for this quote among Orwell’s writings has ever been located, and the earliest published source of this particular phrase found on Google Books is this snippet from p. 5 of Science Dimension, Volumes 14–18 (1982) published by the National Research Council Canada. Quote Investigator has an article “In a Time of Universal Deceit – Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act” indicating their attempts to trace the quote. The earliest similar remarks they had found were in a 1982 book titled “Partners in Ecocide: Australia’s Complicity in the Uranium Cartel” by Venturino Giorgio Venturini, where the word “universal” was omitted, and a specific originating text was not identified: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.“
