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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
Stop
Wish
Pain
Earth
Reason
Thing
Never
Increase

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Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
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At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
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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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Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy
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The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.
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Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
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We do not merely destroy our enemies we change them.
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Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.
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Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.
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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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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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The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
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Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
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One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.
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The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.
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We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
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A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
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Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
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What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.
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Reality is inside the skull.
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