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Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

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
Feelings
Constantly
Inventing
Indiscriminate
Book
Criticism
Exhausting
Reviewing
Praise
Trash
Thankless
Quite
Involves
Praising
Books
Spontaneous
Exceptionally
Feeling
Reactions
Prolonged
Whatever
Critics
Irritated
Jobs
Towards
Irritating

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You are a slow learner, Winston. How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
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If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
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To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
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All men are enemies. All animals are comrades
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For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.
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He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
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Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose
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The more men you've had, the more I love you.
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One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.
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Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.
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Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
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To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.
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The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.
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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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A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.
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No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
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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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