It is widely believed that the author of famous dystopias wrote a phrase about the role that sincerity plays in the face of widespread misinformation. We checked whether this attribution is correct.

In the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, this statement has several versions, in which “general lie” can be changed to “general deception”, and “extremism” - to “revolutionary act” or “revolutionary deed”. Regardless of the wording, the authorship of this phrase is attributed to Orwell on several large quotation sites, for example Socratify.net And "Pearls of Thought". In 2018 her brought in his article “The era of post-truth named after the “Colin Powell test tube””, member of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev, and in 2019 published on Twitter, editor-in-chief of the Ekho Moskvy radio station Alexey Venediktov. The phrase is also associated with the famous writer abroad - for example, her mentioned American singer Katy Perry used Orwell as a quote. This expression is associated with the author of “1984” by large publics in "VKontakte" And Facebook, as well as popular channels in Telegram And Twitter.

The first mention of this phrase in a printed source dates back to 1982 - the famous writer died more than 30 years earlier. The Quote Investigator portal discovered statement in Venturino Giorgio Venturini's book Partners in Ecocide: Australia's Complicity in the Uranium Cartel. The expression served as an epigraph, was enclosed in quotation marks and attributed to Orwell, and the word “universal” was not in that formulation: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Two years later, the phrase was again used in a context related to ecology and environmental protection. In the Canadian journal Science Dimension it was published letter from reader David Hoffman. He expressed dissatisfaction with an article on the economics of wind energy: “I think George Orwell said in his book 1984 that in a time of universal deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. If Science Dimension is not prepared to explore the future of renewable energy technology beyond inaccurate generalizations, then perhaps it should be careful to maintain its own integrity by avoiding the topic entirely.”

Similar, but not analogous, phrases can be found among the writer’s contemporaries. For example, in 1919, Italian political theorist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in his article: “Telling the truth, establishing the truth together is a communist and revolutionary act.”

At the same time, neither we nor our foreign Colleagues could not find this phrase in Orwell's texts. Author books about the dystopia “1984” Dorian Lynskey assertsthat attributing this expression to a famous writer is a mistake.