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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
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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Long
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Aims
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Cuttlefish
Real
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Idioms
More quotes by George Orwell
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
George Orwell
Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.
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The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.
George Orwell
The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
George Orwell
The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.
George Orwell
Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.
George Orwell
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
George Orwell
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
George Orwell
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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History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
George Orwell
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.
George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
George Orwell
If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, I'm a free man in here - he tapped his forehead - and you're all right.
George Orwell
He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.
George Orwell
The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering indeed, they hated it more than ever.
George Orwell
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
George Orwell
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
George Orwell
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?
George Orwell
All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.
George Orwell
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
George Orwell