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Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

George Orwell

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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
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Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
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Opinion Journalist
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Screenwriter
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Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
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People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.
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The more intelligent, the less sane
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If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.
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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.
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The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education and fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which is responsible for economic affairs. their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty
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Take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another.
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England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
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I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.
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Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?
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What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.
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Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
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Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.
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Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
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It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
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Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home what they fear is physical force.
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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.
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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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Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.
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Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
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