"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
— George Orwell
People Sleep Peaceably In Their Beds
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
About this quote
This quote is not found in any verified Orwell text. Quote Investigator traced the earliest known version to a 1993 Washington Times essay by columnist Richard Grenier, who paraphrased — but did not quote — Orwell's general worldview. A later writer added quotation marks, inadvertently transforming the paraphrase into an apparent direct quote. Orwell did write thematically similar observations; in his 1945 essay on Rudyard Kipling he noted that "men can only be highly civilised while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them."
Source
Attributed, widely reported in Orwell collections (paraphrase of themes in his essays)
