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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
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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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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More quotes by George Orwell
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
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Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak.
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It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.
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Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.
George Orwell
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
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The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.
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The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion.
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Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
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Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
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Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.
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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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Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
George Orwell
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
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Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.
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Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
George Orwell
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
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The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.
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And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
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Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.
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Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
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