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We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
Intelligent
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Sunk
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Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.
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The object of powder is powder.
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It was not the man's brain that was speaking it was his larynx.
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Do you remember writing in your diary, he said, that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
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You are a slow learner, Winston. How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
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[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.
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The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
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The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.
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England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
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It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.
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Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
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All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
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But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong.
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The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.
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I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
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No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
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In the face of pain there are no heroes.
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It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
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Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
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Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
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