“People Sleep Peacefully in Their Beds at Night Only Because Rough Men Stand Ready to Do Violence on Their Behalf.”. //

Indeed, Orwell did make thematically similar statements. He wrote an essay in 1942 about writer Rudyard Kipling in which he stated, “[Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”

In another essay, Orwell included a line with a similar sentiment while discussing pacifists: “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.” //

The website Quote Investigator traced the quote to columnist Richard Grenier’s 1993 article in The Washington Times, where he wrote, “As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

Some readers likely mistook Grenier’s attempt at summarizing Orwell’s viewpoint for a direct quotation, even though Grenier’s sentence did not enclose the expression in quotation marks.