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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

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
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It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
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So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
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The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
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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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One must choose between God and Man, and all radicals and progressives, from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
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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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Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
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Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.
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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
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The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
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The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
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The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing.
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How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
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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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To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
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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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Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
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The object of powder is powder.
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...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
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The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.
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