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That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

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
Working
Flat
Labourer
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Flats
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Hanging
Cottage
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Rifle
Gun
Cottages
Wall
Rifles
Democracy
Stays
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Symbol

More quotes by George Orwell

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The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
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Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.
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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 quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
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Four legs gooood, two legs baaad!
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I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
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Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
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Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
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Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
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A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
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The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.
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A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?
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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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After 40, a man is responsible for his face.
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The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.
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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.
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What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
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In the face of pain there are no heroes.
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Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.
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Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
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