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Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

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
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More quotes by George Orwell

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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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We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
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If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
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Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
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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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You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.
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In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.
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I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!
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I do not wish to comment on the work if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
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He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
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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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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
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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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All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.
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The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb
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Reality is inside the skull.
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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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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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They clichés will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
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One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
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