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How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

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
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More quotes by George Orwell

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He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
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They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
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Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
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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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One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.
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To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
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The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside
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I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
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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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Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?
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Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.
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It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought...should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.
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[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.
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Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
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The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.
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One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.
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Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
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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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