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In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
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Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
Politics
Political
Indefensible
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Euphemism
Time
Largely
Thrive
Defense
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Speech

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A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
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Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
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History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
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The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.
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It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.
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For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
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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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How right the working classes are in their materialism. How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
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It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
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Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
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Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
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