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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
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Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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More quotes by George Orwell

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By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
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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...in the negative part of Professor's Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often - at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough - that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.
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There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.
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Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
George Orwell
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The belly comes before the soul.
George Orwell
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No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
George Orwell
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In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
George Orwell
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Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.
George Orwell
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During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.
George Orwell
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... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.
George Orwell
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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.
George Orwell
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From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
George Orwell
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You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.
George Orwell
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I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
George Orwell
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[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.
George Orwell
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If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
George Orwell
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I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
George Orwell
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A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him.
George Orwell
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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.
George Orwell