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It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

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
Book
Books
Enormously
Mind
Possible
Systematic
Would
Powerful
Perceived
Less
Similar
Fear
Product
Tell
Products
Order
Thoughts
Ridden
Best
Already
Scattered

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If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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The object of powder is powder.
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What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.
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The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
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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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To die hating them, that was freedom.
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Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
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Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist
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Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
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A sahib has got to act like a sahib he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.
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From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
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Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
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To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
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Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
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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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No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
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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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A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?
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To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
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The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.
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