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What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

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
Instinct
Expected
Wrong
Sabotage
Thing
Treachery
Infallible
Cowardice
Unconscious
Stupidity

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Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
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The end was contained in the beginning.
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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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But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong.
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If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
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Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.
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The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.
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The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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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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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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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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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?
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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
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He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
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One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.
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The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
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Power is not a means it is an end.
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