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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
First
Sunk
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Depth
Obvious
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Firsts

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But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet --!
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The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.
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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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Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.
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The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.
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The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
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In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone.
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Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
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Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
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The object of powder is powder.
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There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.
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Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise.
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A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as robust.
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The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
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Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.
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A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
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The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
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