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If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

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
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Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
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Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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More quotes by George Orwell

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One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
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I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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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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Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
George Orwell
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We were once told that the aeroplane had abolished frontiers actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.
George Orwell
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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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To die hating them, that was freedom.
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Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
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History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
George Orwell
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From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
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Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
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The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
George Orwell
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...in the negative part of Professor's Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.
George Orwell
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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.
George Orwell
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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.
George Orwell
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The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word Art, and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K. kicking little girls in the head is O.K. even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K.
George Orwell
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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.
George Orwell
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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
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Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
George Orwell