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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
Prose
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More quotes by George Orwell

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What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
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.
George Orwell
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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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If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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.
George Orwell
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A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
George Orwell
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When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
George Orwell
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The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
George Orwell
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You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.
George Orwell
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Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
George Orwell
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Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise.
George Orwell
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Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.
George Orwell
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To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
George Orwell
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Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.
George Orwell
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I have no wish to take life, not even human life
George Orwell
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All men are enemies. All animals are comrades
George Orwell
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In the face of pain there are no heroes.
George Orwell
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The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.
George Orwell
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And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
George Orwell
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Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.
George Orwell