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Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.

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
Wish
Pain
Earth
Reason
Thing
Never
Increase
Stop

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All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
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Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.
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Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
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Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.
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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.
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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.
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The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity.
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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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Writing a novel is agony.
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The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
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What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
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