Quote

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the party was trying to achieve.

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
Thing
Lies
Characteristic
Trying
Truly
Bores
Life
Achieve
Struck
Simply
Insecurity
Listlessness
Modern
Characteristics
Bareness
Party
Cruelty
Streamed
Lying
Ideals
Resemblance
Even
Looked
Bore

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Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.
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And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.
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Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
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The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
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... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.
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The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
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As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'
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For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
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We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
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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.
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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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It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.
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Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.
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They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
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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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In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.
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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.
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Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
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