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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
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George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
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Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
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Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
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More quotes by George Orwell
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out
George Orwell
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
George Orwell
We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.
George Orwell
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening
George Orwell
We were once told that the aeroplane had abolished frontiers actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.
George Orwell
Four legs gooood, two legs baaad!
George Orwell
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.
George Orwell
Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.
George Orwell
Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy
George Orwell
By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.
George Orwell
Sanity is not statistical.
George Orwell
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
George Orwell
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
George Orwell
All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.
George Orwell
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
George Orwell
I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.
George Orwell
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
George Orwell
