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He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.

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
Thought
Exactly
Body
Needed
Freezes
Human
Special
Uselessness
Humans
Effort
Treachery
Kind
Moment
Astonishment
Always
Pain
Inertia
Fear
Freeze
Moments
Biological

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Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.
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Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
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To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
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It was soon noticed that when ever there was work to be done the cat could never be found.
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When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
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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.
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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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From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
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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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Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.
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If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
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International football is the continuation of war by other means.
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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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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.
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Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
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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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One must choose between God and Man, and all radicals and progressives, from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
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Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
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I have no wish to take life, not even human life
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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
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